A huge spiral galaxy called J2345-0449 emits powerful radio jets that span more than 5 million light-years. (Image credit: Bagchi and Ray et al./Giant Meter Telescope (CC BY 4.0))
Almost a billion light years away, a colossal spiral galaxy hurtles into the void.
The creature, dubbed J2345-0449, is a giant radio galaxy, or “super spiral,” that’s about three times the size of our Milky Way. Like our spiral galaxy, it contains a supermassive black hole at its center. However, unlike the Milky Way’s center, J2345-0449’s supermassive black hole emits powerful radio jets — streams of fast-moving charged particles that emit radio waves — that span more than 5 million light-years.
While scientists have not yet determined what is causing the radio jets, a new study published March 20 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at possible formation processes of giant spiral galaxies.
Such powerful radio jets are “very unusual for spiral galaxies,” Patrick Ogle, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. “They can have weak radio jets in general, but these strong radio jets usually come from massive elliptical galaxies. The idea is that to power these really big jets, you need a very massive black hole that’s probably also rotating. That’s why most spiral galaxies don’t have black holes at their centers that are massive enough to create jets that big.”
Data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Giant Meter-wave Radio Telescope, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array suggest that the radio jets are currently preventing stars from forming near the galaxy’s center. This is likely because the jets are heating up surrounding gases to the point that they cannot condense into new stars — or are driving them out of the galaxy entirely.
Giant radio jets spanning more than 5 million light-years across and the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy J23453268−0449256, as seen by
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