How Do X-Shaped Galaxy Get Created
For a long time, astronomers were baffled with X-shaped galaxies. There were many hypotheses for how they form. William Cotton and his coworkers decided to solve the mystery.
Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; SARAO; DES.
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The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is a sleeping giant. But some galaxies have their giants awake. These active colossuses spew out matter and energy influencing their shape.
Usually, two opposite and extremely powerful jets of energy burst out of these active galactic cores. These jets are so massive that they usually reach out into intergalactic space. But sometimes, very rarely, seem as if they had not two but four such jets. Such galaxies then appear as the letter X.
One or two black holes?
Over time, there existed many different theories for how X-shaped galaxies came to be. But for a long time For example, one hypothesis was that the supermassive galaxies at the centers of these galaxies could possibly be changing the direction of their rotations. Or another explanation was that X-shaped galaxies do not have a single supermassive black hole but instead they have two. Or it could have just been as simple as the fact that the material from the jets streaming out of the supermassive black holes could be reflected in different directions which then create the final X-shape.
William Cotton from the American research organization National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his coworkers decided to decipher this mystery. To do it, they used the system of 64 radiotelescopes MeerKAT that was recently put into commission in the Karoo area in South Africa. With a bit of computer magic, this system creates a virtual radio-telescope with a diameter of 8 kilometers.
The powerful radiotelescopes of the MeerKAT system allowed the astronomers to get detailed images of an unusual galaxy PKS 2014-55 – one of the galaxies that look like the letter X. By analyzing these imagines the scientists found out that at least when it comes to the PKS 2014-55 galaxy the hypothesis that says the X-shape is because of the reflecting of the jets that are streaming out of the supermassive black hole into the galaxy. In this case, the streams of matter and radiation reflect on the disk of stars and interstellar material that is near the center of the galaxy.
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