Death Star Galaxy Is Intergalactic "Bully"
Ex-presidential candidate John Edwards speaks outside a federal courthouse as his daughter, Cate Edwards, left, and father Wallace Edwards, listen after his campaign finance fraud case ended in a mistrial Thursday, May 31, 2012 in Greensboro, N.C. Jurors acquitted Edwards on one charge and deadlocked on the other five, unable to decide whether he used money from two wealthy donors to hide his pregnant mistress while he ran for president and his wife was dying of cancer. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) / Chuck Burton
The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a "death star galaxy" blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy.
A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to a new study released Monday 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, who wasn't involved in the research.
But ultimately, this could be a deadly punch.
The telescope images show the bully galaxy shooting a stream of deadly radiation particles into the lower section of the other galaxy, which is about one-tenth its size. Both are about 8.2 billion trillion miles from here, orbiting around each other.
The larger galaxy has a multi-digit name but is 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, including those with orbiting planets, are likely in the path of the deadly jet, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
If Earth were in the way - and it's not - the high-energy 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, said Evans. That would then allow the sun and the jet itself to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.
And what would that do life on the planet?
"Decompose it," Tyson said.
"Sterilize it," Evans piped in.
The jet attack is relatively new, in deep space time. Hardcastle estimates it's no more than 1 million years old and can stretch on for another 10 to 100 million years.
"A truly extraordinary act of violence," Evans said. "The jet violently slams into that lower half of the neighboring galaxy after which the jet dramatically twists and bends."
NASA, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in United States and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom used ground optical and radio telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to get an image of the violence on various wavelengths, including invisible ones. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal next year.
The two galaxies are only 24,000 light-years apart and are in a slow merging process. The jet has already traveled 1 million light-years. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
Tyson said there are two main lessons to be learned from what the telescopes have found:
"This is a reminder that you are not alone in the universe. You are not isolated. You are not an island."
And "avoid black holes when you can."
© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to a new study released Monday 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, who wasn't involved in the research.
But ultimately, this could be a deadly punch.
The telescope images show the bully galaxy shooting a stream of deadly radiation particles into the lower section of the other galaxy, which is about one-tenth its size. Both are about 8.2 billion trillion miles from here, orbiting around each other.
The larger galaxy has a multi-digit name but is 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, including those with orbiting planets, are likely in the path of the deadly jet, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
If Earth were in the way - and it's not - the high-energy 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, said Evans. That would then allow the sun and the jet itself to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.
And what would that do life on the planet?
"Decompose it," Tyson said.
"Sterilize it," Evans piped in.
The jet attack is relatively new, in deep space time. Hardcastle estimates it's no more than 1 million years old and can stretch on for another 10 to 100 million years.
"A truly extraordinary act of violence," Evans said. "The jet violently slams into that lower half of the neighboring galaxy after which the jet dramatically twists and bends."
The good news is that eventually an area of hot gas that gets hit and compressed by this mysterious jet - astronomers are still baffled by what's in it and how it works - over millions and billions of years can form stars, Tyson said.
NASA, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in United States and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom used ground optical and radio telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to get an image of the violence on various wavelengths, including invisible ones. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal next year.
The two galaxies are only 24,000 light-years apart and are in a slow merging process. The jet has already traveled 1 million light-years. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
Tyson said there are two main lessons to be learned from what the telescopes have found:
"This is a reminder that you are not alone in the universe. You are not isolated. You are not an island."
And "avoid black holes when you can."
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The writer was referring to the "latest" as "cosmic in scope". What he means by that is that in the cosmos 1 million years is less then a split second compared to what we can even comprehend. Cosmos time can go back hundreds of billion of years so what is a million? It might as well have just happened.
What? Huh? Where did . . . I don''t . . . How can this . . .
Senseless violence caught on tape?
Everything is violence or body bags to the A$$ociated Press.
Posted by rushlimpdrug at 12:46 PM : Dec 19, 2007
No, just proves you''re dumb.
Good News, The United Nations is on its way to handle the situation. They are expected to try and get both sides talking but look on as innocent alien women and children and sterilized, siting that the proper paper work hadn''t been filled out in their defense.
Jimmy Carter is also on his way to the galaxy, and Hillary Clinton has publicly accused the Universe of planting a conspiracy among the warring galaxies to gain a personbal and imprproper advantage.
In DC, The president was seen recently getting in his
tie-fighter after saying the evil-doers would nbot stand and then mumbling something to himself about "Bullseying Wamprats."
More News as it becomes available....
Posted by thgdriver
You don''t understand what it is they are saying, once a particle crosses the event horizon there is no going back, nothing can escape. The jet, however, is not coming out of the singularity, it expelled from the near vicinity of the event horizon (you might call it a "particle shell", just outside the event horizon) by magnetic jets, powered on quantum scales, whose energy also approaches the black holes'', but accelerates particles to speeds which can break the gravitational pull. Once they do break, their speed, and therefore kinetic energy is enough to blast them outwards for millions of light years before they slow back down.
Not so hard to understand and or imagine...