Scientists have seen an active galaxy far, far away – and it looks like it may be participating The fleet of Darth Vader.
Galaxy TXS 0128 + 554 lies 500 million light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation, has a striking resemblance to the iconic Star Wars aircraft. According to a paper published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal, the Milky Way is active, meaning all of its stars are incapable of emitting much light on themselves.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy has a mass about one billion times that of our Sun. It radiates jets of energy over 35 light-years in opposite directions at almost the speed of light that scientists believe gamma rays produce – good for excess light.
Around a tenth of active galaxies produce these jets – which in this case appear as the wings of the starfighter – as gas and dust build up and are heated by gravity and frictional forces.
NRAO
Scientists have been studying the galaxy for about five years, after NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reported that it is a source of gamma radiation, the highest energy form of light. Years of data were needed to confirm the finding, as TXS 0128 is about 100,000 times less powerful than most of the other 3,000 active galaxies observed.
In addition, researchers used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory to further observe the galaxy.
“After the Fermi announcement, we have zoomed in a million times closer to the galaxy with the VLBA’s radio antennas and their shape over time,” said Matthew Lister, a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in a news release. “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.'”
Not only was the symbol a “pleasant surprise”, its appearance actually helped researchers. Lister said that viewing the galaxy’s nucleus on various radio frequencies provided new information on how dramatic galaxies change dramatically over time.
The shape of the galaxy looks different, depending on the radio frequency used. The TIE fighter form is generated at 6.6 gigahertz (GHz). Alternatively, the galaxy at 2.3 GHz looks like an amorphous blob, and then at 15.4 GHz a clear gap appears between the core and its jets.
NRAO / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“The real world universe is three-dimensional, but when we look at space, we normally see only two dimensions,” said Daniel Homan, a co-author and professor of astronomy at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. “In this case, we are happy, because the Milky Way is angled in such a way, from our perspective, that the light of the far lobe travels tens of more light-years to reach us than the light of the nearest one. “This means we see the further lobe at an earlier point in its evolution.”
The gap may be due to a brief silence in the jets of the galaxy. It seems that they started about 90 years ago, as observed from Earth, then continued before stopping about 50 years later. Then, about 10 years ago, the jets started up again, but scientists are still not sure why.
“This galaxy reminds us of the importance of observations at multiple wavelengths, and looks at objects across a wide range on the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Elizabeth Hays, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Fermi, the VLBA, and Chandra each add a layer to our growing image of this object, and discover their own surprises.”
The TIE hunting star joins Saturn’s Death Star moon Mimas and a Jabba-the-Hutt-shaped rock found on Mars. Hopefully astronomers are looking for some Jedi symbolism in addition to bringing some balance to the universe.
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