‘Black-hole bully’ shoots deadly jet at neighbour
Telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, according to a study released by NASA.
“It’s like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy,” said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York.
Images show the bully galaxy shooting a stream of deadly radiation particles into the lower section of the other galaxy, which is about a 10th its size. Both are 13.2 billion trillion kilometres from here, orbiting one another.
The larger has been called the “death star galaxy” by one of the researchers who discovered the galactic bullying, Daniel Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Tens of millions of stars and planets are in the jet’s path, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire.
If Earth were in the way — and it’s not — the particles and radiation of the jet would in a matter of months strip away the planet’s protective ozone layer and compress the protective magnetosphere. That would allow the sun and the jet to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.
And what would that do life on the planet? “Decompose it,” said Mr Tyson. “Sterilise it,” said Mr Evans.
Mr Hardcastle estimates the jet is no more than a million years old and can stretch on for another 10m to 100m years. The good news is that eventually an area of hot gas hit and compressed by the jet — astronomers are still baffled by what’s in it and how it works — over millions and billions of years can form stars, said Mr Tyson.
The two galaxies are only 24,000 light years apart and are merging. The jet has already travelled 1m light years. A light year is about 9.46tn kilometres.
Mr Tyson said there are two lessons to be learned from the discovery: “This is a reminder that you are not alone in the universe.”
And “avoid black holes when you can”.
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