Black hole fireworks in nearby galaxy Messier 106

A galaxy about 23 million light-years away is the site of impressive, ongoing, fireworks. 

Rather than paper, powder, and fire, this galactic light show involves a giant black hole, shock waves, and vast reservoirs of gas. 

Credit: NASA /CXC /JPL-Caltech /STScI /NSF /NRAO /VLA

Celebrants this Fourth of July will enjoy the dazzling lights and booming shock waves from the explosions of fireworks.

A similarly styled event is taking place in the galaxy Messier 106 (NGC 4258), as seen by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions.

Energetic jets, which blast from Messier 106's central black hole, are heating up material in the galaxy and thus making it glow, like the ingredients in a firework.

The jets also power shock waves that are driving gases out of the galaxy's interior.

Those gases constitute the fuel for churning out new stars. A new study estimates the shock waves have already warmed and ejected two-thirds of the gas from the center of Messier 106.

With a reduced ability to birth new stars, Messier 106 appears to be transitioning into a barren, so-called lenticular galaxy full of old, red stars. Lenticular galaxies are flat disks without prominent spiral arms.

"Jets from the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 106 are having a profound influence on the available gas for making stars in this galaxy," said Patrick Ogle, an astrophysicist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a new paper describing the results.

"This process may eventually transform the spiral galaxy Messier 106 into a lenticular galaxy, depriving it of the raw material to form stars."

Many galaxies contain a central black hole that actively "feeds" upon nearby gas.

Some of the material, as it draws toward the black hole, dramatically speeds up and violently spews out as twin jets near the black hole's poles.

As one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors, Messier 106 offers a great opportunity for investigating these high-powered jets.

Messier 106 is 23.5 million light-years distant, and visible with binoculars in the constellation Canes Venatici.

For the new study, researchers used data obtained with the Spitzer infrared telescope before the observatory ran out of coolant in 2009, as planned.

The data amount to a map of the infrared light emitted by heated-up hydrogen molecules in Messier 106.

The warmed hydrogen is a signature of the jet from the central black hole energizing the surrounding disk of the galaxy.