Storm in the Teacup: 'Doomsday' Ripples Through Galaxy

Astronomers studying an otherwise "boring" galaxy over a billion light-years from Earth have been surprised to see a powerful storm erupt from its core, an event that will quench any new star formation in the foreseeable future.

“It appears that a supermassive black hole is explosively heating and blasting around the gas in this galaxy and, as a result, is transforming it from an actively star-forming galaxy into one devoid of gas that can no longer form stars,” said lead-researcher Chris Harrison, of The Center for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University in the U.K.

Using the National Science Foundation’s famous Very Large Array (VLA) — a "Y"-shaped configuration of radio telescopes in New Mexico that featured heavily in the Jody Foster movie “Contact” — Harrison and his team studied J1430+1339, also known as the “Teacup” owing to its apparent shape. This research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Teacup has been identified as possessing an active supermassive black hole in its core, consuming any material that falls too close, but it is also thought to be a galaxy in transition. Once an active star-forming galaxy, it now has the appearance of a giant elliptical galaxy, a sign that star formation may be coming to an end. It is for this reason that the astronomers are keen to observe galaxies such as these; they are galaxies undergoing huge changes and by understanding black hole activity, the processes driving pan-galactic transformation can be revealed.

The impact of the supermassive black hole in the core of the Teacup is clear — vast radio bright bubbles expanding up to 40,000 light-years protrude from the galaxy’s core with smaller-scale jets of plasma accelerating material to around 1,000 kilometers per second (2.2 million miles per hour). This incredibly high level of activity came as a surprise.

“These radio observations have revealed that the central black hole is whipping up a storm at the center of this galaxy, by launching powerful jets that are accelerating the gas in the host galaxy and are colliding with the gas on larger scales,” said co-investigator Alasdair Thomson, also from Durham. “This is the same kind of powerful process we’d previously seen in rare, extremely radio-luminous galaxies. The incredible capabilities of the VLA have allowed us to discover that these processes can occur in the more-common, radio-faint galaxies, as long as you look hard enough.”

Read more at Discovery News