This illustration shows a side-long view of active galaxy TXS 0128 + 554. This angle makes it look like an imperial spaceship.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Cue de Star Wars Imperial March. We have an active galaxy that looks like it belongs in Darth Vader’s fleet. Fortunately, it is 500 million light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia and we do not have to involve it in a space dogfight.
NASA on Tuesday shared a new look of the Galaxy TXS 0128 + 554, pointing out its similarity to a TIE fighter.
The galaxy has a supermassive black hole in the center and emits twin rays of energy. The appearance of the shooting became very clear when the Very Very Baseline Array network looked at radio signals originating from the galaxy. Certain frequencies made it clear that it would have to dock at the Death Star at any given moment.
The Very Long Baseline Array radio antenna network considered TXS 0128 + 554 at 15.4 gigahertz, which put out its TIE fighter form.
NRAO
A research team investigating the galaxy on Tuesday published a paper detailing its findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
The team used observations from a variety of sources, including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to build a more complete picture of the galaxy. We see TXS 0128 + 554 in a corner, emphasizing its Star Wars features.
What qualifies TXS 0128 as an “active” galaxy is the amount of extra light it emits, more than what its stars alone can provide.
“The extra energy of an active galaxy includes excessive radio, X-ray and gamma-ray light,” NASA said in a release. “Scientists think this emission originates from regions near its central black hole, where a rotating disk of gas and dust accumulates and heats up due to gravitational and frictional forces.”
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Lead author Mathew Lister, an astronomer at Purdue University, thought the TIE fighter result was “a pleasant surprise, but performing on various radio frequencies also helped us learn more about how active galaxies can change dramatically on decades of time scales.”
The galaxy fits well into the small pantheon of Star Wars lookalikes in space, including Saturn’s “Death Star Moon” Mimas and a Jabba-de-Hutt-shaped rock on Mars. The universe needs to step up and start representing the Jedi side so that we can maintain balance in the Force.
