Desk Report
Publish: 22 Feb 2022, 08:06 pm
Photo: Collected
Little is known about these mysterious radio galaxies but
experts think the jets and lobes associated with them are a byproduct of an
active supermassive black hole at the galaxy's centre.
A black hole is defined as 'active' when it's eating, or
'accreting', material from a giant disk of material around it, reports
dailymail.co.uk.
Not all of this material ends up beyond the event horizon,
however, because a tiny fraction gets funnelled from the inner region of the
disk to the poles, where it is blasted into space in the form of jets of
ionised plasma.
These jets are able to travel huge distances at the speed of
light, before spreading out into giant radio-emitting lobes.
Despite Alcyoneus' size, the type of radio lobes it emits
are not out of the ordinary. Our Milky Way is also known to have its own radio
lobes.
But one of the most mysterious things about Alcyoneus and
other massive galaxies like it is how they grow so large.
Researchers led by the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands
hope their discovery of Alcyoneus could help shed light on how radio galaxies
form and why they are so big.
'If there exist host galaxy characteristics that are an
important cause for giant radio galaxy growth, then the hosts of the largest
giant radio galaxies are likely to possess them,' Martijn Oei, of Leiden
Observatory, said in a pre-print of the research paper.
'Similarly, if there exist particular large-scale
environments that are highly conducive to giant radio galaxy growth, then the
largest giant radio galaxies are likely to reside in them.'
Oei and his team discovered the largest known galaxy while
searching for outliers in the data that the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) in
Europe had put together.
The LOFAR is made up of around 20,000 radio antennas,
distributed throughout 52 locations across the continent.
Researchers had to remove compact radio sources from the
images to help detect radio lobes and correct for any optical distortions,
which in turn led them to Alcyoneus.
According to the astronomers involved in the study, the
largest known galaxy is surrounded by a cosmic web over 240 billion times the
mass of the sun.
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Topic : Largest Known Galaxy Black hole
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