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.

ESA Hubble Iamge: Starbursts in the galaxy NGC 4485, constellation Canes Venatici

This image from NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxy NGC 4485 in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). 

The galaxy is irregular in shape, but it hasn’t always been so. 

Part of NGC 4485 has been dragged towards a second galaxy, named NGC 4490 (The Cocoon Galaxy), which lies out of frame to the bottom right of this image.

Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

Between them, these two galaxies make up a galaxy pair called Arp 269. Their interactions have warped them both, turning them from spiral galaxies into irregular ones.

Arp 269

NGC 4485 is the smaller galaxy in this pair, which provides a fantastic real-world example for astronomers to compare to their computer models of galactic collisions.

The most intense interaction between these two galaxies is all but over; they have made their closest approach and are now separating.

The trail of bright stars and knotty orange clumps that we see here extending out from NGC 4485 is all that connects them, a trail that spans some 24 000 light-years.

Many of the stars in this connecting trail could never have existed without the galaxies’ fleeting romance.

When galaxies interact hydrogen gas is shared between them, triggering intense bursts of star formation.

The orange knots of light in this image are examples of such regions, clouded with gas and dust.

NASA GALEX: Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft Decommissions

This image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) shows Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736, in ultraviolet light. 

It is located 17 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA has turned off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) after a decade of operations in which the venerable space telescope used its ultraviolet vision to study hundreds of millions of galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic time.

"GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," said Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program executive in Washington.

"This small Explorer mission has mapped and studied galaxies in the ultraviolet, light we cannot see with our own eyes, across most of the sky."

Operators at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va., sent the signal to decommission GALEX at 12:09 p.m. PDT (3:09 p.m. EDT) Friday, June 28.

The spacecraft will remain in orbit for at least 65 years, then fall to Earth and burn up upon re-entering the atmosphere.

GALEX met its prime objectives and the mission was extended three times before being cancelled.

Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include:

• Discovering a gargantuan, comet-like tail behind a speeding star called Mira.
• Catching a black hole "red-handed" as it munched on a star.
• Finding giant rings of new stars around old, dead galaxies.
• Independently confirming the nature of dark energy.
• Discovering a missing link in galaxy evolution—the teenage galaxies transitioning from young to old.

The mission also captured a dazzling collection of snapshots, showing everything from ghostly nebulas to a spiral galaxy with huge, spidery arms.

In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership.

Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion light-years away.

In the space telescope's last year, it scanned across large patches of sky, including the bustling, bright center of our Milky Way.

The telescope spent time staring at certain areas of the sky, finding exploded stars, called supernovae, and monitoring how objects, such as the centers of active galaxies, change over time.

GALEX also scanned the sky for massive, feeding black holes and shock waves from early supernova explosions.

David Schiminovich

"In the last few years, GALEX studied objects we never thought we'd be able to observe, from the Magellanic Clouds to bright nebulae and supernova remnants in the galactic plane," said David Schiminovich of Columbia University, N.Y., N.Y, a longtime GALEX team member who led science operations over the past year.

"Some of its most beautiful and scientifically compelling images are part of this last observation cycle."

Data from the last year of the mission will be made public in the coming year.

"GALEX, the mission, may be over, but its science discoveries will keep on going," said Kerry Erickson, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

A slideshow showing some of the popular GALEX images is online at: go.nasa.gov/17xAVDd

NGC 5033 is a galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici

NGC 5033 is a galaxy that lies some 40 million light-years away in the northern constellation Canes Venatici.

The image captures striking details of dust lanes winding inward toward the galaxy's bright core and majestic but relatively faint spiral arms that span over 100,000 light-years.

The galaxy is similar in size to our own spiral Milky Way.