First-Ever Photo Proof of Powerful Jet Emerging From Colliding Galaxies

A team of Clemson University College of Science researchers, in collaboration with international colleagues, has reported the first definitive detection of a relativistic jet emerging from two colliding galaxies -- in essence, the first photographic proof that merging galaxies can produce jets of charged particles that travel at nearly the speed of light. Phys.Org reports: The paper is titled "TXS 2116-077: A gamma-ray emitting relativistic jet hosted in a galaxy merger." In addition to Paliya, who is now at the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany, the other Clemson authors include associate professor Marco Ajello, professor Dieter Hartmann, and adjunct professor Stefano Marchesi of the department of physics and astronomy. The fact that the jet is so young enabled the researchers to clearly see its host. According to Ajello, others have already imaged galactic collisions many times. But he and his colleagues are the first to capture two galaxies merging where there is a fully formed jet pointing at us -- albeit, a very young one, and thus not yet bright enough to blind us.

Jets were thought to be born from older, elliptical-shaped galaxies with an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which is a super-massive black hole that resides at its center. As a point of reference, scientists believe all galaxies have centrally located super-massive black holes, but not all of them are AGNs. For example, our Milky Way's massive black hole is dormant. Scientists theorize that the AGNs grow larger by gravitationally drawing in gas and dust through a process called accretion. But not all of this matter gets accreted into the black hole. Some of the particles become accelerated and are spewed outward in narrow beams in the form of jets. Ajello believes that the team's image captured the two galaxies, a Seyfert 1 galaxy known as TXS 2116-077 and another galaxy of similar mass, as they were colliding for the second time because of the amount of gas seen in the image. The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

What type of jet?

[Cipheron]

What type of jet? Is it a Douglas DC-8? Because that would prove L Ron Hubbard right.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

Oh man! Can you even imagine two galaxies filled with Hulks?!

F-22

[backslashdot]

Still not as expensive a jet as the F-22 Raptor.

Re:

[Errol backfiring]

No. While fire power can occur in nature, precision isn't cheap.

Maybe

[rossdee]

Boeing could produce it under license - they have a 737 Max factory doing nothing right now

What time is it?

[AndyKron]

It's good to spend time looking away from Earth from time to time to get away from all the bullshit.

A grammatical error in their own name?

[BAReFO0t]

Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron

Really?

That would be English grammar, with merely misused German words.

It's either
Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron
or, if and only if that is confusing,
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
.
So the opposite of the English rules.

And yes, you can still write "DESy", even for the compound word case. As the words in it still count as words on their own.

So I hardly think they made an error *in their own name*.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

If you Read The Friendly Paper (I give the Arxiv link elsewhere in this thread) you'll discover that the corresponding author (which normally also means the person who put the paper together and submitted the whole lot to both the journal and to Arxiv) is Vaidehi S. Paliya, and in the paper he wrote/ edited, he gives his (and some others) institution as "Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron DESY, Platanenallee 6, 15738 Zeuthen".

I guess you know who to complain to.

I assume that your German is better than mine.

Eno

[Cmdln Daco]

Here Come The Warm Jets [youtube.com]

Let me be the first to say

[gillbates]

Pics or it didn't happen.

Oh, wait.

It just seems odd that scientists have finally come around to requiring photo proof. Usually, the data was good enough.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

The article doesn't even present a photograph, just a plot of relative radio intensity versus RA and Dec on the sky. The resolution would need a pretty good telescope - multi-metre opticals, good AO - but they don't present one. So I infer that the object isn't radiating noticeably at visible (or IR or UV) wavelengths.

Checking on SIMBAD [u-strasbg.fr] none of their optical/ IR imaging bands get above about 20-30 pixels for the structure, so the image presented seems to be from radio observations - as if the use of the Ja

Reading the article

[stabiesoft]

reminded me of a question as a dummy on astronomy. Will black holes consume everything eventually? They seem to have an entrance but no exit.

What about this one?

[spikenerd]

This photo on Wikipedia, claiming to depict a relativistic jet, taken by the Hubble telescope, was taken 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Can anyone explain what this new photo shows that the old one does not?