• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Galaxy Gets Reclassified Now Its Supermassive Black Hole Is Shooting Straight At Us

March 23, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Astronomers had to reclassify a galaxy this week because something almost unique happened at its center. Its active supermassive black hole has a jet, and it is no longer pointing in the same direction it used to. It is now pointing at us, after a major change.

The galaxy is called PBC J2333.9-2343 and is located 657 million light-years away. It was classified as a giant radio galaxy because once upon a time, its supermassive black hole released jet material creating two vast lobes on either side of the galaxy, extending for 4 million light-years. For context, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is 105,000 light-years across.

Advertisement

The jet was perpendicular to our line of sight when these lobes were created. So, imagine their surprise when astronomers looked at the galaxy and saw the jet pointing right at Earth. Somehow it must have shifted by an angle of up to 90 degrees.

“We started to study this galaxy as it showed peculiar properties. Our hypothesis was that the relativistic jet of its supermassive black hole had changed its direction, and to confirm that idea we had to carry out a lot of observations,” Dr Lorena Hernández-García, lead author of the paper and researcher at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, said in a statement.

Galaxies whose jets point at us are called blazars. The emission of these jets is often so powerful that it can outshine the galaxy that hosts the supermassive black hole. A blazar has high-intensity flares that can outdo radio features like the lobes. But in the case of this galaxy, the lobes are the dominant feature when observed with radio waves. Only follow-up observations with different telescopes revealed the blazar’s nature, hence the need for reclassification.  

“The fact that we see the nucleus is not feeding the lobes anymore means that they are very old. They are the relics of past activity, whereas the structures located closer to the nucleus represent younger and active jets,” Hernández-García added.

Advertisement

So how did this shift happen? The most likely hypothesis, according to the researchers, is a merger event, meaning the galaxy collided with another. Another option is that an intense burst of activity after a dormant period might have pushed the supermassive black hole onto a new axis.

More observations will be needed to model this peculiar galaxy and its shifting supermassive black hole. 

The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Poland condemns jailing of Belarus protest leaders
  2. China energy crunch triggers alarm, pleas for more coal
  3. China proposes adding cryptocurrency mining to ‘negative list’ of industries
  4. Stranded Dolphins’ Brains Show Signs Of Alzheimer’s-Like Disease

Source Link: Galaxy Gets Reclassified Now Its Supermassive Black Hole Is Shooting Straight At Us

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version