For the first time, astronomers have detected a jet erupting from the core of a distant galaxy that has changed directions.
About one percent of the mass black holes, which lies at the center of most galaxies, has disks of gas and dust orbiting it. Debris from this disk hurtling toward the growing black holes shoots powerful jets at light-like speeds in random directions. These jets push huge amounts of energy into nearby regions and help shape them galaxies over eons, so one of the ways astronomers classify galaxies depends on how these jets are directed.
For example, when the nuclei of galaxies contain streams of charged particles that shoot vertically when viewed from Landthey are called Quasars. Sometimes, the jets are directed directly at Earth, and these are called galactic nuclei Blazars. While astronomers know that quasars and barbarians exist, the latest discovery is the first time they’ve spotted a galaxy in the former cluster morphing into the latter.
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The discovery comes from a distant galaxy called PBC J2333.9-2343, whose core has jetted in the past but has been quiet for a long time. In the latest research, astronomers found that the core had brought the jets back to life again, and one of them had “radically” changed directions. The galaxy that spans an area of four million light years It is located about 656 million light-years away from Earth. It shines strongly in radio waves hence it is called the radio galaxy. Due to the sharp change in the plane’s direction, astronomers have redefined the giant radio galaxy as a galaxy with a Blazar at its center.
“We started studying this galaxy because it showed strange properties,” said Lorena Hernandez García, an astronomer at the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics in Chile and lead author of the study. statement (Opens in a new tab). “Our hypothesis was that the relativistic jet of its supermassive black hole had changed direction, and to confirm this idea we had to make a lot of observations.”
So Hernandez García’s team studied the galaxy across the entire galaxy Electromagnetic field – Including radio, optical, infrared, x-ray, and ultraviolet wavelengths, and we found that one of the jets that was perpendicular to our line of sight has changed its direction by 90 degrees, so it is now facing Earth. Astronomers say this is “a very extraordinary case of jet reorientation” and warrants a redefinition of the galaxy.
While galaxies are classified based on the direction of the planes, why they change directions is not well understood. Few astronomers speculate that galaxy mergers or black holes contribute to intermittent bursts of jet activity, and that the directions of the jets change between bursts.
Such activity is not surprising, since astronomers already know that bright but rare X-shaped galaxies, whose remarkable X-shape arises from erratic, jet-like behavior, act similarly. The team behind the latest study believes that the galaxy PBC J2333.9-2343 is also X-shaped: “We don’t see an X-shape, but that could be explained because the new jets are, by chance, pointing towards us,” the authors write in their study.
This research is described in a sheet (Opens in a new tab) Published March 20 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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