A group of astronomers in South Africa have made a rare find: a dying radio galaxy, which once housed a massive black hole.
Radio galaxies are some of the most luminous objects in the universe. The brightest are called quasars and blazars, as gases swirling around the massive black hole at the center of such a galaxy spews out colossal amounts of energy. However, they’re as rare as they are energetic, and radio galaxies past their prime are the rarest.
The discovery was made using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) Observatory, located near Pune in western India.
According to the paper, the new galaxy, J1615+5452, is more than 300,000 light-years across – three times the size of our Milky Way – but lacks the centralized, energetic core typical of such galaxies, which are driven by supermassive black holes gobbling up as much dust and gas as they can and spewing huge fountains of energy out into space.
According to Phys.org, radio galaxies live hot and fast lives, astronomically speaking: they burn out after some 100 million years. However, they are comparatively harder to spot after that, and studying the late phase of a radio galaxy is just as important as studying the active phase.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
