Fantastical Beasts From Outer Space

The radio telescope array MeerKAT tracked down two faintly glowing but otherwise gigantic galaxies that are very close to each other in the sky. Each would fit roughly 62 Milky Ways. Truly galactic giants.

Image by Lumina Obscura from Pixabay

• Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me @kralizec and subscribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel

The MeerKAT radio telescope array observes the Universe with its 64 satellite dishes in the South African province Northern Cape. It works since 2018 and since then it already made a number of interesting discoveries. Now, MeerKAT scored again with a discovery that excited experts all over the world.

MeerKAT discovered two rare and incredible creatures from space – giant radio galaxies. These galaxies are considered to be among the largest individual objects in the Universe. Regular radio galaxies are quite common in the Universe and they are galaxies with a very active galactic center that is incredibly active in the radio-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But we know only of a few hundred that came fire off radio bursts with a length roughly larger 22 times than the size of the Milky Way. These are the monsters we call giant radio galaxies.

Jacinta Delhaize from the University of Cape Town and her team found the two aforementioned giant radio galaxies very close to each other in a part of the sky roughly the size of four full moons. According to our knowledge, this was very unlikely – scientists estimate the probability to be less than 0.0003 percent.

On top of that, the newly discovered giant radio galaxies are even more special. Both are in the top ten of the largest giant radio galaxies ever found. Both are larger than 6.5 million light-years across. Our own galaxy would fit into them about 62 times. At the same time, they are less bright than other similarly sized galaxies.

So far, it isn’t clear why we haven’t found a larger number of giant radio galaxies. One of the possibilities is that these radio galaxies are the oldest of their kind. That means that their active galaxies centers are doing their job for the longest time and thus fired off the longest polar bursts. If that is true, then there should certainly be many more similar galaxies.

MeerKAT found the giant radio galaxies while exploring the sky during research called MIGHTEE (MeerKat International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration). The MeerKAT array is the best in the world for this kind of observation mainly because they are sensitive to weak and scattered radio-wave radiation. Soon, MeerKAT will become part of an intercontinental radiotelescope array called Square Kilometre Array (SKA) that should start working in the middle of the 2020ies.

Sources:

*https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/cosmic-beasts-and-where-find-them

---

• If you like the content I’m producing about science maybe you will like the content I produce about gaming as well! Be sure to check out my other posts!