The Lynnertic

Black Holes Don’t Just Suck - They Blow

Zap! You’re looking at a jet of radiation escaping a black hole at the center of one galaxy to irradiate the edge of a second. The jet then bends and continues on in another direction.

The jet is described in this Washington Post article:

“What we’ve identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire,” said Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He said any planets orbiting the stars of the smaller galaxy would be dramatically affected, and any life forms would likely die as the jet’s radiation transformed the planets’ atmosphere.

Black holes are generally thought of as mysterious cosmic phenomena that swallow matter, but the supermassive ones that occur at the center of many — possibly all — galaxies also set loose tremendous bursts of energy as matter swirls around the disk of material that circles the black hole but does not make it in.

That energy, often in the form of highly charged gamma rays and X-rays, shoots out in powerful jets that can be millions of light-years long and 1,000 light-years wide.

Scientists are just beginning to understand these jets, which not only transform matter in their path but also help produce “stellar nurseries,” where new stars are formed.

The photo is a composite image. The event scientists witness now actually happened no more than a million years ago and could continue for another million to ten million years.

It’s worth noting that the galaxies appeared to be headed towards a collision, which could have triggered the burst. This is significant because as the Milky Way and Andromeda eventually merge, millions of years from now, a simiilar event could occur in either one of the galaxies’ black holes.

Three orbiting instruments were used to study the phenomenon: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope. Ground-based observations were made at Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico and Britain’s Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network.