The Death Star is Approaching the Planet. The Death Star is ....Ah, just blast through the planet!

From a galaxy far far away….

So, the front page of my newspaper today tells of an article inside with new pictures of a galaxy releasing blasts of radiation energy that are attacking a nearby galaxy. Talk about a bad neighborhood…

But the pictures are fabulous, and the story amazingly cool!

Picture credit: A black hole jet at the center of a galaxy strikes the edge of another galaxy. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/ STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN

This study was released Monday by NASA. There are two galaxies in a system of space known as 3C321. The galaxies are 8.2 billion trillion miles from Earth. The system contains two galaxies quite close to each other (20,000 light years apart) that orbit around each other. Both have black holes in their centers. One of the black holes is releasing a jet of energy that is shooting into the other galaxy. One of the study’s authors, Daniel Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is calling it the “Death Star” galaxy. (If you haven’t seen Star Wars, run don’t walk, to the video store).

The jets of energy are composed of high amounts of X-rays and gamma rays, which can be lethal in high quantities. And in this case, we’re talking about super-high quantities emanating from a black hole. The ozone layer of a planet could be obliterated if it came into the path of one of these jets of energy. It could probably sterilize all life on the planet.

One of the goals of astrophysical research is to learn more about these jets in the study of black holes. They are apparently not uncommon. What is uncommon is to have visual evidence of a jet affecting directly another galaxy. (aside: Hmmm, I thought that nothing could escape a black hole, so what is the nature of this type of energy that it can be released from something that can trap light energy? Anyone know? I’ll have to read up on this)

The effect of this jet on the neighbor galaxy is probably huge. In the long term, however (and we’re talking several million years now), the result of this onslaught on the receiver galaxy could be the formation of new stars and planets.

It’s all a cycle, isn’t it? Destroy what’s there, and something else grows to take its place. It’s like an intergalactic version of the Las Vegas Strip.

(Additional information and images are available at:
http://www.nasa.gov/chandra/ and http://chandra.harvard.edu/)