This galaxy is "bombarding" another galaxy with plasma streams

A weird black hole is spewing plasma into a nearby galaxy

Scientists recently discovered a strange black hole at the center of a distant galaxy that is ejecting plasma streams into neighboring galaxies at speeds close to the speed of light.

This unique black hole is located at the center of the RAD12 galaxy, and its jets of plasma are bombarding the neighboring RAD12-B galaxy. The two galaxies are about 1 billion light-years from Earth and are in the process of colliding and merging.

This is the first time that a stream of plasma ejected from the center of a galaxy has been observed bombarding another galaxy!

Plasma jets from RAD12 bombard a nearby galaxy (Image courtesy of Ananda Hoda/Giant Metrewave Telescope/Canada-Hawaii Telescope and the Meerkat radio telescope in South Africa)

In the field of astrophysics, this plasma flow contains ionized gas and electrons. These two jets usually appear at the same time and move in opposite directions, with a relative speed close to the speed of light. However, in the RAD12 galaxy, only one jet was observed to be ejected from the central black hole toward the RAD12-B galaxy, while the other reverse jet did not exist. The cause of this single jet phenomenon is still a mystery!

The unique system helps us understand how newborn stars "quench" because the jets disperse the cool gas necessary for the star formation process, the team said in a newly published study.

"It is exciting to find such a rare system involving galaxy mergers and star formation, which can help us understand jets from supermassive black holes," said Ananda Hoda, an assistant professor in the Department of Atomic Energy at the University of Mumbai, India, who led the study, in a report.

The asymmetry of RAD12's jet was discovered in 2013 in visible light from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and in radio waves from the Very Large Array. Hoda and his colleagues subsequently confirmed the galaxy's peculiar behavior using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the Meerkat radio telescope, a 64-antenna radio telescope in Meerkat National Park, South Africa.

The Very Large Array radio telescope is located in New Mexico and consists of 27 antennas with a diameter of 25 meters.

While a newly ejected cone of plasma can be seen in the central region of RAD12 moving across the stars in the galaxy, data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope suggest the presence of a fainter, older plasma stream that extends much further.

This older plasma flow forms a complete jet structure like the top of a mushroom, with a length of 440,000 light-years, which exceeds its original galaxy and directly "hit" the nearby RAD12-B galaxy.

"Using data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope and other telescopes such as the Meerkat radio telescope, it is clear that the jet of RAD12 is colliding with a nearby galaxy," Hoda said.

The Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope, which played an important role in this study, is located on the Deccan Plateau in India.

Hoda also said that the public also played a huge role in studying RAD12. RAD@home is India's first citizen science research platform, and thousands of researchers and students have contributed to the project.

The research results were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on October 12.

Black hole: A region of spacetime whose gravitational effects are so strong that not even light or electromagnetic waves can escape its boundaries. The theory of general relativity predicts that when matter is compressed to a certain degree, it can cause spacetime to bend to form a black hole. The boundary beyond which matter cannot escape is called the black hole's event horizon. Although a black hole has a huge impact on the fate of objects near it, according to general relativity, it itself cannot be observed. In many ways, a black hole is like an ideal, non-luminous black body. In addition, quantum field theory of curved spacetime predicts that black holes will produce Hawking radiation, whose spectrum is equal to the radiation spectrum produced by a black body with a temperature inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. This temperature is about one billionth of a Kelvin for a stellar black hole, and this extremely low temperature also makes it extremely difficult to observe.

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT): This is a large telescope array consisting of radio telescopes distributed around the world. This project will collect data from several very long baseline interferometry base stations distributed around the world, and through comprehensive processing, obtain sufficient angular resolution accuracy to meet the needs of observing the horizon of supermassive black holes. Its observation objects include two black holes, both of which have the largest angular diameters observable from Earth: one is the black hole at the center of the Messier M87 giant elliptical galaxy, and the other is the black hole at Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way.

BY: Robert Lea

FY: TelescopeX

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