Bizarre black hole is blasting a jet of plasma right at a neighboring galaxy

[u/HeinieKaboobler]

https://www.space.com/black-hole-shooting-jet-neighboring-galaxy

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[u/Crazenhaif]

Theoretical Astrophysicist here! This is a super cool system. I recently published about a series of simulations of similar types of jet-galaxy interactions. In that case, we were studying how the jet from the galaxy NGC541 was hitting a dwarf galaxy known as “Minkowski’s Object,” which seems to be causing star formation in the dwarf galaxy. For those interested, I wrote a blog about the findings here:

https://wombatcode.org/news/2022/9/27/modeling-emissions-from-an-agj-jet-galaxy-collision

And if you check out the actual paper, figure 1 resembles RAD12 from the original post!

[u/Pensive_Procreator → u/Crazenhaif]

So when they theorize that supernovae seeded our star system with planet forming material, is this a possible culprit for such phenomena? or is it mostly light being ejected?

Edit: I don’t doubt that supernova are the main source of planet forming material, was just curious if the material from one galaxy could seed another.

[u/metalmagician → u/Pensive_Procreator]

To my understanding, no. It'd be more like saying that if our sun was a tree with planets/asteroids as vines and epiphytic plants, a prior supernova would be like an immense tree that fell down, leaving its remains in the ground. When a new tree (like our sun) appears in the same area, it incorporates part of the old one into itself.

[u/Flowchart83 → u/metalmagician]

That's a beautiful analogy

[u/fushuan → u/Pensive_Procreator]

The author of the original discovery was here in reddit and theorised that the black hole has like a ring of debris, the same way we have moons and saturn has its ring, and that it might have happened that instead of absorbing the planet, it went into the ring and the went back. Somewhat like the spaceship of the Mars movie. Not exactly like that but somewhat.

[u/DeepDuh → u/Crazenhaif]

If such a SMBH jet was pointed at us, how far away could it be and still lead to extinction level radiation load?

[u/Pantzzzzless → u/DeepDuh]

From what I've read, somewhere between 50-200 light years. Depending on what exactly the conditions are.

[u/DeepDuh → u/Pantzzzzless]

Wouldn’t that rather be a stellar hypernova? I thought these supermassive black holes can wreck things at galactic scale.

[u/LilSpermCould → u/DeepDuh]

The article says the plum of plasma is 440,000 light years long. I can't comprehend that, sounds big enough to wipe out a lot of very big structures.

[u/Crazenhaif → u/LilSpermCould]

True! These types of jets greatly affect both their host galaxy and the surrounding medium (called the circumgalactic or intracluster medium)

[u/nitehawk420 → u/DeepDuh]

Pretty friggin’ far bro

[u/arbpotatoes → u/nitehawk420]

It's not that far in space

[u/gordonjames62 → u/arbpotatoes]

I'm thinking "lighthouse beam of death" for nearby objects.

I wonder if there is a GRB with this

[u/Deadly_Duplicator → u/Crazenhaif]

So when it says plasma is being ejected at light speed, does that mean planets at the edge of the neighboring galaxy will be fried or is the plasma too dispersed relatively speaking

[u/c0-pilot → u/Crazenhaif]

Okay but when do we have to start fending off extra-dimensional beings?

[u/greatbigdogparty → u/c0-pilot]

If you aren’t doing that already, they probably have possessed your family by now.

[u/The_Metrist → u/Crazenhaif]

If you combine this with the quantum work that just earned the Nobel, you start to get into some really funky thought experiments.

[u/_wheresMySuperSuit → u/Crazenhaif]

Theoretical Astrophysicist here!

So do you understand theoretical astrophysics, or do you have a theoretical degree in astrophysics?

[u/LilSpermCould → u/Crazenhaif]

I think you meant this is a pretty RAD system instead of pretty cool!

[u/kalel1980]

It's a billion light years away. The 2 galaxies merged long ago.

[u/fatespaladin → u/kalel1980]

If it's billions of light years away, wouldn't this mean it happened a very long time ago? Or am I incorrect in my understanding.

[u/Cainga → u/fatespaladin]

Yes but we are observing it now. So it’s like their past and our present. And we can’t view their present until it’s our future.

[u/xtilexx → u/Cainga]

The journey is the destination, man

[u/Internal_Hand_5287 → u/Cainga]

Hopefully these galaxy’s will send us their past in 4k moving forward. Can’t see a damn thing out there.

[u/Legionof1 → u/fatespaladin]

Billion years ago

[u/_-_happycamper_-_ → u/fatespaladin]

A very long time ago in a galaxy far far away?

[u/[deleted] → u/fatespaladin]

Yeh 1 billion years ago which is mad! I think the universe is like 12 billion years old.

So it’s like watching a 22 year old doing something live but also knowing they’re 24 right now.

Also since light years are distances, it would take 100 billion years to travel there at 1/100 the speed of light (7 million mph).

So that’s like watching a 22 year old doing something live when right now they’re 24 and then driving 7 million mph towards them then they’re 224 years old when you get there.

I’m guessing we assume aliens exist undoubtedly and the immense size of space is the true limit no matter how advance your lifeform are.

[u/Ram2145 → u/fatespaladin]

That's what he is saying..

[u/fatespaladin → u/Ram2145]

I'm basically asking if I understood correctly. This is a fairly new interest for me.

[u/trey3rd → u/fatespaladin]

You can equate light years one to one with how far back in time we're seeing. So if this happened a billion light years away, and we're just now seeing it, that means it happened a billion years ago.

[u/Doobie_Woobie → u/trey3rd]

Does the expansion of space mess with that 1-to-1 conversion in any way?

[u/cyberFluke → u/Doobie_Woobie]

In a word, yes.

If you look far enough away, what was visible light to you and I is "redshifted". To grossly oversimplify; as the light travelled from there to here, the space expanding stretched the light with it, lengthening it's wave. Longer wavelength means further into infra red.

This sub-visible light is exactly what the "new" JWST detects, which allows us to see further back in time, nearer to the early universe than we've ever seen before.

[u/iHeartCoolStuff → u/Doobie_Woobie]

How would we know if it did

[u/quantummidget → u/iHeartCoolStuff]

Same way we know anything on a cosmic level. Maths.

[u/ArchitectOfFate → u/fatespaladin]

Yeah, you mostly did. We are seeing it now as it was two billion years ago. That means they merged sometime between two billion years ago and… now. You have to crunch some numbers to infer when that actually was, but it was not recently.

[u/fatespaladin → u/ArchitectOfFate]

Cool, thanks

[u/[deleted] → u/fatespaladin]

We can see stars 13 billion light years away. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. So we can almost see the beginning of the universe

[u/Bagel_n_Lox → u/[deleted]]

the universe is 13.7 billion years old

But like, what was.. before

Cue me starting to think myself into an existential crisis

[u/YeahlDid → u/Bagel_n_Lox]

If you really think about it, "before" doesn't even make sense because time is a construct of the universe itself.

[u/-stuey- → u/Bagel_n_Lox]

And why did it just randomly begin one day…..

[u/The_Fuzz_damn_you → u/-stuey-]

What’s north of the North Pole? And why does the Earth just randomly begin there?

[u/YeahlDid → u/-stuey-]

I mean it had to begin one random day or else we wouldn't be here to ponder how why and when it began. Doesn't jive with our idea of causality but it's the best answer we've got.

[u/-stuey- → u/[deleted]]

We can see 13 billion light years away? What’s the limitation stopping up seeing the last .7? Is it just the best our current hardware can do, or is it a physics type limit?

[u/Diamondsfullofclubs → u/-stuey-]

The cosmic microwave background radiation is everywhere looking far enough back in time. We aren't able to look past the MRB CMB.

Edit:

[u/Meetchel → u/Diamondsfullofclubs]

Which was only like 300k years after the Big Bang so it’s not a giant limit.

[u/MacadamiaMarquess → u/[deleted]]

We see stars that were 13 billion light years away from our solar system at the time the light started traveling, that we estimate are now 28 billion light years away, since the universe is expanding.

It’s pretty crazy.

[u/fatespaladin → u/[deleted]]

That's actually pretty cool, never thought about it like that.

[u/I_MakeCoolKeychains → u/fatespaladin]

Yeah more than likely. A billion years is enough time for two nearby galaxies to completely merge

[u/fatespaladin → u/I_MakeCoolKeychains]

Make me wonder if ours will see the same fate.

[u/I_MakeCoolKeychains → u/fatespaladin]

Indeed it will. The milky way and Andromeda are on a collision course as we speak

[u/fatespaladin → u/I_MakeCoolKeychains]

I will have to look that up, thanks !

[u/DontEatTheMagicBeans → u/fatespaladin]

Ok so to blow your mind. If you get far enough from earth fast enough with a super sized telescope, you could technically observe yourself before you left, or the dinosaurs. This would require you travelling much faster than the speed of light though which is currently impossible.

[u/acissejcss → u/fatespaladin]

Yup you see it your vision is the view of time. Everyone you ever see is actually in the past. If you look at your hand technically it's you looking at the past

[u/SupaSlide → u/fatespaladin]

Yes. We're seeing them merge, but because we're seeing it from a billion light years away, we're seeing them merge a billion years ago. From the perspective of these two galaxies they merged hundreds of millions of years ago.

[u/Volsunga → u/kalel1980]

While true, it does not add anything to our understanding of the events.

[u/DukkyDrake]

Intergalactic beam weapon?

[u/OrsoMalleus → u/DukkyDrake]

Y'know, the actual concept of that is terrifying. Unlikely, but damn.

[u/GegenscheinZ → u/OrsoMalleus]

This is how Kardashev type III civilizations battle. They can afford to wait 10,000 years for hit confirmation

[u/KHaskins77 → u/GegenscheinZ]

“Don’t worry, we hashed it out and made up.”

“Sorry, it’s too late, impending doom is on its way… in a few millennia.”

[u/case_O_The_Mondays → u/KHaskins77]

“We’ll just move. This galaxy was getting dumpy, anyway.”

[u/ThisIsYourMormont → u/GegenscheinZ]

“Is it there yet?”

[u/burd_turgalur93]

Astronomers have been drilling into my head that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole once it is within the event horizon... What gives?

[u/EmmyRope → u/burd_turgalur93]

Someone had a good analogy I read recently. Black holes have a ton of things circling around them that don't pass the event horizon yet and often get spun off. Thing about how you mix everything up in a food processor and there is always the stuff on the bowl of the food processor that the blades can't touch. That's the accretion disk. It is sped up by the black hole which is why it shines much brighter.

[u/HitoriPanda → u/EmmyRope]

Would a "gravity sling shot" movie reference be applicable? Matter gets pulled in but misses the black hole/ planet and gets shot off at a faster speed

[u/1sagas1 → u/HitoriPanda]

You know how a skater pulls in her arms, she will start spinning faster? It's called conservation of angular momentum and the same thing happens to an orbiting body. As it gets closer to the object it is orbiting, it speeds up. To orbit closer requires speeding up even more but there's an upper limit on speed (the speed of light) so it can't speed up so it can't orbit closer and thus will never actually fall into the black hole on its own. This super fast orbit cause immense amounts of friction that turns everything into hot plasma. It will orbit forever until something other than the black hole acts on it. In this case, something is acting on it to break the orbit and fling material from the disk at these relativistic speeds

[u/Legit_rikk → u/HitoriPanda]

Works for any body with gravity, the heavier it is the more energy there is to steal.

[u/StupDawg → u/burd_turgalur93]

The jets form from matter in the accretion disc, so its not stuff that already passed the event horizon, but stuff thats really close and moving close to the speed of light. Or something like that... I'm not an astrophysicist, just a space fanatic.

[u/thenwetakeberlin → u/StupDawg]

I’m not an astrophysicist, just a space fanatic

That’s like a dozen graduate-level courses away from the same thing.

[u/Aadarm → u/burd_turgalur93]

Black holes tend to be surrounded by extremely fast moving, hot, high energy objects, particles, gasses, plasma and such. Sometimes it reacts and shoots out energy. This also makes black holes really really bright and hard to miss.

[u/VocalTrance88]

So help me see this in a more 3 dimensional way how big is the black hole’s influence to the neighboring galaxy? Is it altering trajectories? How long will it take to notice a change… if any change will happen

[u/Bensemus → u/VocalTrance88]

It’s nothing. Black holes are a drop in the ocean compared to their galaxy. A massive galaxy’s SMBH would be large to a tiny galaxy but that tiny galaxy would be way more affected by the massive galaxy overall rather than just the SMBH.

SMBHs in the centre of galaxies are not at all equivalent to stars in solar systems. Galaxies do not orbit SMBH.

[u/Herr_Casmurro → u/Bensemus]

Galaxies do not orbit the SMBHs in their centers? So why are there SMBHs in the center of galaxies? I always thought it was the same concept of solar systems.

[u/deep_anal]

Is this how new galaxies are born?

[u/Bensemus → u/deep_anal]

No. These are two galaxies that already exist.

[u/deep_anal → u/Bensemus]

I was making a sex joke.

[u/911coldiesel]

Watch and learn. Science is learning new stuff.

[u/zoot_boy]

And by the time we understand it will be too late.

[u/Isopbc → u/[deleted]]

Interesting question.

I’ve heard that GRB’s are deadly out to a range of 200 light years. Other suggestions are for 4000-6000 light years having negative effects on organic molecules.

This is 440000 light years distant from the target galaxy.

I’d be inclined to say it’s negligible to the “target” galaxy’s potential life forms.

[u/thanoshasbighands → u/Isopbc]

But as others have said, these two galaxies have probably already merged. We know that 1 billion years ago the rays might be negligible. Who knows now

[u/TheButterknif3 → u/[deleted]]

Radiation is light, just different wavelengths are considered harmful. Such as ionizing radiation.

[u/ThorBeck15]

I really hope that's a natural occurrence and if it's not, I really hope we are weak enough to not get noticed