TIE Fighter Galaxy
Using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray space telescope in 2015, a team of astronomers saw an galaxy with an unusual shape.
Several years later, they returned for a much closer look at the object far, far away, with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of ten radio telescopes in Hawaii, and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
“Following the Fermi announcement, we have zoomed in a million times closer to the galaxy with the VLBA’s radio antennas and mapped shape over time,” said Matthew Lister, professor of astronomy at the Purdue University in Indiana, and lead author of a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, in a NASA statement.
“The first time I saw the results, I immediately thought it looked like Darth Vader’s TIE fighter jet from ‘Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope,'” Lister added.
That’s not a month
The galaxy lies about 500 million light-years away, near a giant supermassive black hole about a billion times the mass of the sun.
It is an “active galaxy”, which means that it emits excessive light beyond what can be counted by all its stars. Scientists believe that this excess energy includes radio, X-ray and gamma-ray energy.
Some of these galaxies emit two jets of high-energy particles that travel almost at the speed of light, which collide with intergalactic gas, and send it directly back to its center. That’s how the team believes the TIE fighter system got its “wings”.
Fortunately, it was not only a “pleasant surprise” for Lister and his team, “but performing on different radio frequencies also helped us learn more about how active galaxies can change dramatically on time scales.”
In other words, the galaxy was seen at just the right angle, allowing them to see the farthest lobe when it was at an earlier point in their evolution.
READ MORE: NASA missions investigate a ‘TIE Fighter’ active Galaxy [NASA]
More about distant galaxies: Dark energy researchers are discovering nearly 21,000 new galaxies
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