NASA Chandra: Gigantic Black Hole Jets Shines - Video

A powerful jet shooting from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy shines in a newly released image and video tour.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory gathered data that was used to create the new photo of the galaxy Centaurus A — which is located about 12 million light-years from Earth.

The space-based observatory collected the data from 1999 to 2012, but the space agency released the photo on Feb. 6. You also can take a full video tour of the Centarus A photo.

While the black hole jet is a prominent feature, the picture also shows what scientists think to be the leftovers of a collision between Centaurus A (Cen A for short) and a smaller galaxy millions of years ago.

The "dust lane" that wraps around the middle of Cen A could be the remains of the incorporated galaxy, NASA officials said in the video.

The galaxy Centaurus A shines in a photo taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

Image uploaded Feb. 10, 2014. Credit: NASA/CXC/U.Birmingham/M.Burke et al.

"In this image, the lowest-energy X-rays Chandra detects are in red, while the medium-energy X-rays are green, and the highest-energy ones are blue," a NASA official said in the video explanation.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been observing Cen A since 1999, just after the space telescope came online. Scientists have found that point-like X-ray sources in Cen A fall into two groups.

The X-ray sources come from a system where either a black hole or neutron star is siphoning gas from a companion star, NASA officials said.

"These compact objects form by the collapse of massive stars, with black holes resulting from heavier stars than neutron stars," NASA officials said.

"The results suggested that nearly all of the compact objects [neutron stars or black holes] had masses that fell into two categories: either less than twice that of the sun, or more than five times as massive as the sun. These two groups correspond to neutron stars and black hole."

The Chandra observations are the first that show that the gap could occur in distant galaxies, space agency representatives said.

"If it turns out to be ubiquitous, it may mean that a special, rapid type of stellar collapse is required in some supernova explosions," NASA officials said.

Centaurus A: Facing a mid-life crisis!

Centaurus A was facing a midlife crisis.

The giant elliptical galaxy's brightest stars were old and puffy, and it had nearly run out of gas needed to create new ones.

The galaxy was just a featureless blob that had lost its sparkle.

Then a chance encounter allowed boring old Centaurus A to have a fling with a younger, smaller galaxy.

The event revived the elder partner, triggering a fresh round of star birth and creating one of its most notable features: a dark dust lane along its middle.

In a surprise twist, new observations show the cosmic hanky-panky also caused Centaurus A to sprout two spiral arms – something no other elliptical galaxy is known to have.

The discovery offers new insights into how galaxies form and evolve, and hints at a new way for spiral structure to emerge.

Shocking revelation
The bisecting dust lane led astronomers in the early 19th century to think that Centaurus A might be two separate objects lying side by side. More recent studies have shown that the dust is most likely a disc left behind by a galactic merger.

By blocking visible light, the dust also conceals the intimacies of the galaxy's steamy affair. To gather more clues, Daniel Espada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and colleagues looked at Centaurus A in radio wavelengths.

These longer waves emerge from carbon monoxide gas at the galaxy's centre and can pierce the dusty veil, allowing the team to trace otherwise hidden structures. What they saw was shocking.

"We were quite surprised to find what clearly looked like spiral arms," says team member Alison Peck of the Joint ALMA Observatory in Santiago, Chile.

Their images show the tentacles of gas curving around the galaxy's middle, with widths and orientations similar to those of the arms of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.

What's more, the gas tentacles are "moving in a way that you would expect spiral arms to move", says Peck.

ESO ALMA Image: Centaurus A in Infra-Red

This new image of Centaurus A combines ALMA and near-infrared observations of the massive elliptical radio galaxy. The green parts show gas coming towards us while more orange features depict gas moving away.

Picture: ESO / BEL/AFP/GettyImages

ESO ALMA Turns Its Eyes to Centaurus A

A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center.

Centaurus A is a massive elliptical "radio galaxy," (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very luminous center hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the Sun.

As seen in visible light, a dark dusty band obscures the galaxy's center. This dust lane harbors large amounts of gas, dust and young stars. These features, together with the strong radio emission, indicate that Centaurus A is the result of a collision between a giant elliptical galaxy and a smaller spiral galaxy.

To see through the obscuring dust in the central band, astronomers need to observe using longer wavelengths of light, such as infrared light or radio waves.

The new ALMA observations, shown in a gradation of blue in this image, reveal the position and motion of clouds of gas in the galaxy.


They are the sharpest and most sensitive such observations ever made. ALMA was tuned to detect signals with a wavelength around 1.3 millimeters, emitted by molecules of carbon monoxide gas.

The motion of the gas in the galaxy causes slight changes to this wavelength, shown in this image as changes in color. Violet and dark-blue features trace gas coming towards us, while light-blue features depict gas moving away.

We can see that the gas to the left of the center is moving towards us, while the gas to the right of the center is moving away from us, indicating that the gas is orbiting around the galaxy.

The millimeter wavelength observations were made using super-sensitive radio receivers built by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. In this image the ALMA observations are overlaid on an optical image of Centaurus A produced by the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Construction of ALMA, on the Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile, will be completed in 2013, when 66 high-precision antennas will be fully operational. Half of the antennas already are installed. Early scientific observations with a partial array began in 2011, and already are producing outstanding results. The ALMA observations of Centaurus A shown here were taken during the telescope's Commissioning and Science Verification phase.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage). Visible-light image: ESO

ESA ESO VLT: Gaseous ring around young star V1052 Centaurus

Artist's conception image of a young star surrounded by a disk (made up of rings) (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Astronomers have detected a mysterious ring of carbon monoxide gas around the young star V1052 Cen, which is about 700 light years away in the southern constellation Centaurus.

The ring is part of the star’s planet-forming disk, and it’s as far from V1052 Cen as Earth is from the sun. Discovered with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, its edges are uniquely crisp.

Carbon monoxide is often detected near young stars, but the gas is usually spread through the planet-forming disk. What’s different about this ring is that it is shaped more like a rope than a dinner plate, said Charles Cowley, professor emeritus in the University of Michigan who led the international research effort.

“It’s exciting because this is the most constrained ring we've ever seen, and it requires an explanation,” Cowley said. “At present time, we just don't understand what makes it a rope rather than a dish.”

Perhaps magnetic fields hold it in place, the researchers say. Maybe “shepherding planets” are reining it in like several of Saturn’s moons control certain planetary rings.

“What makes this star so special is its very strong magnetic field and the fact that it rotates extremely slow compared to other stars of the same type,” said Swetlana Hubrig, of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), Germany.

The star’s unique properties first caught the researchers’ attention in 2008, and they have been studying it intensely ever since.

Understanding the interaction between central stars, their magnetic fields, and planet-forming disks is crucial for astronomers to reconstruct the solar system's history.

It is also important to account for the diversity of the known planetary systems beyond our own. This new finding raises more questions than it answers about the late stages of star and solar system formation.

“Why do turbulent motions not tear the ring apart?” Cowley wondered. “How permanent is the structure? What forces might act to preserve it for times comparable to the stellar formation time itself?”

The team is excited to have found an ideal test case to study this type of object.

“This star is a gift of nature,” Hubrig said.

The findings are newly published online in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The paper is titled “The narrow, inner CO ring around the magnetic Herbig Ae star HD 101412.”

Authors are from the University of Michigan, the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany, the Istituto Nazionale die Astrofisica in Italy and the European Southern Observatory.

ESA NASA Hubble Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A

Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Hubble's panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust.

The warped shape of Centaurus A's disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble close-up.

At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive black hole or the jets are visible in this image.

This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

NASA - Firestorm of Star Birth in the Active Galaxy Centaurus A

Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Hubble's panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust.

The warped shape of Centaurus A's disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble close-up.

At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive or the jets are visible in this image.

This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

Centauris A: Enormous Galaxy found

This composite image compares the radio glow of an enormous galaxy called Centaurus A to a full Moon.

The white dots in the sky are not stars but other sources of radio emissions that are smaller, or more distant than Centaurus A.

The foreground antennas are the Australia Telescope Compact Array , which captured the radio data used to make up the image.

(Image: Ilana Feain, Tim Cornwell & Ron Ekers (CSIRO/ATNF) / R. Morganti (ASTRON) / N. Junkes (MPIfR) / Shaun Amy, CSIRO.)