Astronomers in India have let out a very strange galaxy , and it ’s dying . By now , in fact , it ’s probably already utter .
The new galaxy , known as J021659 - 044920 , is 9 billion light years off from Earth . That means it ’s really onetime in cosmic condition ( but not quite as older as the sure-enough object astronomers have ever found , a galax 13 billion light long time forth called UDFy-38135539 ) . Viewed in the visible spectrum , J021659 - 044920spans about 100,000 light age from one sharpness to the other – but there ’s much more there than meets the optic .
When Prathamesh Tamhane , a student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research , and his colleagues looked at J021659 - 044920 in the radio receiver spectrum , they watch giant lobes of wireless discharge , stretch out 4 million unaccented years from closing to ending . J021659 - 044920 is what uranologist call a elephantine radio galaxy , and it ’s a rare find . Tamhane and his colleagues bring out their uncovering in the journalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
Like most galaxies , this one has a supermassive black hole at its heart . As the black hole ’s incredible sombreness draw material toward it , the doomed material falls inward in a spiral . The motion of all that charged material creates brawny electromagnetic personnel , which can speed up material forth from the black hole at nearly the speed of Light Within . Those jets of hot plasm , blasting away from the ignominious hole in diametrical directions , produce huge lobes of radio emission that can span much groovy distances than the galax ’s seeable light .
stargazer call these “ radio galaxy , ” and smaller one , less than a million lightheaded years across , are comparatively coarse , in astronomic terms . The image above , for instance , is radio galaxy Hercules A , shown in a visible light image from the Hubble Space Telescope blend with a radio range of a function from the Very Large raiment in New Mexico . But only a few giant radio galaxy like J021659 - 044920 are much rarer , especially at such swell distances , have ever been get . And this one is dying .
Image : J021659 - 044920 . The red and yellow lobe are the galaxy ’s radio lobes . The cerise situation in the gist is the seeable galaxy . Prathamesh Tamhane / Yogesh Wadadekar .
When the black muddle at the pith of a radio galaxy stops producing blood plasma jets , the radio set lobes ’ power informant gets cut off , and they slowly fade away over the next few million years . Tamhane and his fellow worker observed J021659 - 044920 at this terminal stage of its life , with its enormous radio lobes still there but beginning to slicing . In fact , because J021659 - 044920 is so far aside , its radio lobes probably faded out long ago , but their light is only now achieve Earth .
Top mental image : NASA and ESA
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