This picture is a combination of visible light seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves, coloured pink in the image, detected by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
In the heart of the galaxy Hercules A is a monster black hole: It’s about 600 times as massive as the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, making it about 2.5 billion times the Sun’s mass.
Material is actively funneling down into this black hole, forming a huge disk and blasting out the jets of material seen in the picture.
Focused tightly, those jets shoot across space at very high speed, slamming into material around them.
Eventually they lose energy and slow down, causing them to spread outward, forming the twin lobes shown.
Also when this happens, the material emits light in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The lobes of Herc A make it one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the entire sky.
The scale of this event is incredible.
Those lobes are well over 1.5 million light years across from edge to edge, 15 times the size of our entire galaxy, and they’re powerful, emitting a billion times the energy our Sun does at radio wavelengths.
The energy flowing out of Hercules A is beyond belief. The black hole blasts out 100 billion times as much energy in X-rays, as our Sun does in all wavelengths of light.
The black hole at the heart of Hercules A emits enough X-ray energy to easily vapourise our entire Earth and most of the Solar System.
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