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Supermassive black holes at the centre of active galactic nuclei power someof the most luminous objects in the Universe. Typically, very long baselineinterferometric (VLBI) observations of blazars have revealed only funnel-likemorphologies with little information of the ejected plasma internal structure,or lacked the sufficient dynamic range to reconstruct the extended jetemission. Here we show microarcsecond-scale angular resolution images of theblazar 3C 279 obtained at 22 GHz with the space VLBI mission RadioAstron, whichallowed us to resolve the jet transversely and reveal several filamentsproduced by plasma instabilities in a kinetically dominated flow. Our highangular resolution and dynamic range image suggests that emission featurestraveling down the jet may manifest as a result of differentialDoppler-boosting within the filaments, as opposed to the standard shock-in-jetmodel invoked to explain blazar jet radio variability. Moreover, we infer thatthe filaments in 3C 279 are possibly threaded by a helical magnetic fieldrotating clockwise, as seen in the direction of the flow motion, with anintrinsic helix pitch angle of ~45 degrees in a jet with a Lorentz factor of~13 at the time of observation.

Filamentary structures as the origin of blazar jet radio variability