{"id":120318,"date":"2025-05-21T17:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T17:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/120318\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T17:09:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T17:09:08","slug":"astronomers-witness-galaxy-shanking-its-rival-with-a-beam-of-radiation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/120318\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Witness Galaxy Shanking Its Rival With a Beam of Radiation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the cold, ancient reaches of the cosmos, two galaxies are duking it out in a battle that\u2019s been raging for billions of years. But it\u2019s not a fair fight, a team of astronomers recently found, as one of the galaxies is using a quasar to pierce the other, severely hampering its development.<\/p>\n

The team observed the \u201ccosmic joust,\u201d as they\u2019ve dubbed the interaction, using Chile\u2019s Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope. The researchers witnessed something bizarre: one galaxy shooting a beam of radiation<\/a> directly into another, disrupting its ability to form new stars. The team\u2019s results, published<\/a> today in Nature, offer a front-row seat to some of the most intense intergalactic violence the universe has to offer.<\/p>\n

The interaction is so distant that the light in the images took 11 billion years to reach us. The cosmic conflagration appears just as it did when the universe was just 18% of its current age. Though they appear plain and inert in the above image, the galaxies are actually hurtling towards one another at over 311 miles per second (500 kilometers per second).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe discovered a quasar\u2014likely triggered by the merging of two galaxies\u2014that is actively transforming the gas structure in its companion galaxy,\u201d Pasquier Noterdaeme, a CNRS researcher at the Institut d\u2019Astrophysique de Paris and co-lead author of the paper, told Gizmodo in an email. \u201cThe idea that galaxy mergers give rise to quasars has long been proposed, mainly supported by statistical studies of host galaxy morphologies,\u201d Noterdaeme added. \u201cIn our case, we caught the two galaxies in the act.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AA wide-field view of the cosmic joust. Image: DESI Legacy Survey <\/p>\n

The team found that radiation from one galaxy\u2019s quasar\u2014an active galactic core powered by a supermassive black hole\u2014was disrupting regions in the other galaxy. That energy is shooting straight into the other galaxy like a lance, slicing through clouds of gas and dust. Because of the disturbance, the researchers say, the regions are probably too small to form new stars; the quasar-wielding galaxy effectively sabotaged its opponent\u2019s ability to birth new light.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see for the first time the effect of a quasar\u2019s radiation directly on the internal structure of the gas in an otherwise regular galaxy,\u201d said Sergei Balashev, co-lead author of the study and a researcher at the Ioffe Institute in Russia, in an ESO release<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the galaxy with the quasar isn\u2019t just chipping away at the other\u2014it\u2019s also transforming itself. As the galaxies brush past one another, the interaction funnels gas toward the quasar\u2019s central black hole, fueling it for more violent outbursts.<\/p>\n

The unique interaction was made visible thanks to ALMA\u2019s high resolution, which allowed astronomers to see that the light source in deep space was actually two galaxies (previous observations made the closely spaced objects appear as a single entity). ESO\u2019s X-shooter scrutinized the quasar\u2019s light, helping the researchers understand how the radiation affected the other galaxy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more to discover beyond the horizon\u2014and I\u2019m not talking about the event horizon<\/a>. Instruments like the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope<\/a> (ELT) could let scientists dissect even more of these ancient galactic brawls, giving us a clearer picture of how quasars shape the galaxies they live in\u2014and destroy the ones they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the cold, ancient reaches of the cosmos, two galaxies are duking it out in a battle that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[901,19168,6680,74,53690,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-120318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-galaxies","10":"tag-galaxy","11":"tag-physics","12":"tag-radio-telescopes","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114546931403441046","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}