By Xinhua
Beijing : A “Death Star” galaxy is blasting a smaller neighbor with a powerful jet of particles and magnetic radiation, NASA astronomers said on Monday.
They said the two galaxies appear to be merging and the disturbance in the magnetic field caused by this movement may have awakened a dormant, supermassive black hole in one of the galaxies.
But the never-before-seen display may also one day lead to a new burst of star and planet formation. And it may help unravel the many mysteries about how such jets form, how they work, and how they evolve, experts said.
“The origin, propagation, and energy dissipation of jets are among the most important unsolved problems in modern astrophysics,” said lead study author Daniel Evans of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jets may hold also vital clues to figuring out how energy was transported in the formative stages of the universe, he added.
Evans and his team presented the findings Monday during a NASA teleconference. The work will also appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
The “Death Star” galaxy is one of two galaxies orbiting each other at an unusually close distance. The pair is located in the constellation Serpens about 1.4 billion light-years from Earth.
That galaxy, which is also thought to harbor a supermassive black hole, has swung itself into the path of the jet and is rotating clockwise toward it.