116 radio snapshots become a jet movie

A neural algorithm called kine turns 116 VLBA radio frames of blazar 3C 345 into a continuous movie of its plasma jet. That time-linked reconstruction lets astronomers map local, instantaneous flow across the jet instead of tracking only a few bright knots.1

On the reconstructed video, optical-flow speeds for two components land near 10–13 times the speed of light in apparent motion — in line with earlier MOJAVE component fits — while the method is built to scale across whole VLBI monitoring programs.12