Astronomers operating the Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory of the National Science Foundation were surprised to discover energetic activity within a galaxy that they have considered to be "boring."
The discovery has provided the astronomers with significant insight into the catastrophic effects that supermassive black holes can cause on galaxies where they are located.
"It appears that a supermassive black hole is explosively heating and blasting around the gas in this galaxy," said Chris Harrison, an astronomer from Durham University. The supermassive black hole is changing the galaxy from an active, star-forming one into a galaxy devoid of gas which is no longer able to create stars.
There are two major kinds of galaxies. Spirals, which are abundant in gas and are actively creating stars, and Ellipticals, which are devoid of gas and form a very little amount of stars.
Astronomers believe that elliptical galaxies started as galaxies that are able to actively create stars. However, supermassive black holes that are located at the center of the galaxies cause strong jets and winds of material which destroy or remove the materials needed by the galaxy to continue forming stars.
Harrison added that astronomers have been observing evidence of the incident for several years occurring in extremely bright galaxies. However, for a better understanding of how all the galaxies are formed, his team needed to determine if the same thing happens in the less extreme galaxies, which represent most of the galaxies.
Harrison and his colleagues utilized the VLA to observe a galaxy tagged as J1430+1339, which is also named the "Teacup" galaxy due to its appearance. Located around 1.1 billion light years away, the Teacup galaxy has the typical characteristics of galaxies that have a black hole in their center that actively consume material. Observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope also showed that the Teacup looks like an elliptical galaxy, but because of the gas surrounding it, the galaxy is probably still changing from a star-forming kind of galaxy.
Alasdair Thomson, another astronomer from Durham, said that the observations that the team made on the Teacup galaxy reveal that the black hole in the center of the galaxy is accelerating gas to speeds of about 1,000 kilometers per second, proving that such process can also happen in the more common, radio-faint galaxies and not just in the extremely radio-luminous ones.
The discovery of the phenomenon in the Teacup galaxy means that the process of black holes removing or destroying materials for star formation is more typical than previously thought, which may be an important factor in the understanding of the formation of galaxies.
