BY A stroke of luck, astronomers have spotted one of the largest structures in the known universe.
The object, a gigantic stream of superhot material some 16million light-years across, is 100 times wider than our Milky Way galaxy.
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That means it would take a conventional spacecraft roughly 170billion years to get from one end to the other.
The team behind the discovery, led by researchers in the Netherlands, named the object Alcyoneus in a paper shared online this week.
It’s what’s called a “radio galaxy” – long, bright jets of matter that erupt from the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies.
They provide the building blocks from which stars and planets are eventually formed and are therefore vital to the galactic life cycle.
Study lead author Martijn Oei said that further analysis of Alcyoneus could finally shed light on how these mysterious objects grow.
“If you look up at the night sky with your eyes, you’ll see ordinary galaxies and stars,” Oei, an astronomy PhD student at Leiden University, told The Sun.
“But if you look with a radio telescope, you see very different aspects of galaxies.
“Namely, that many of them have these violent outflows that look a little like plumes shooting from the centre of galaxies. Those structures are called radio galaxies.”
To better understand these cosmic beasts, Oei, alongside astronomers at Oxford and Hertfordshire universities, set out to find examples of the largest radio galaxies in the universe.
They reanalysed images captured by the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey, which uses telescopes around the globe to scan vast swathes of space.
Astronomers can typically only spot the light from stars, making it difficult to image things outside of galaxies.
However, the team used a technique that involved lowering the resolution of LOFAR images to catch the faint whisps of radio waves in the otherwise fuzzy space around them.
“It’s as if you’re standing in front of a painting and then squint your eyes,” Oei said.
“The image will become a little blurred, and that sort of highlights the large scale structures and removes the finer details to give you the bigger picture.”
They weren’t expecting to find Alcyoneus when they “blurred” an image of a galaxy some 3billion light-years from Earth.
“The fun thing is that, in fact, we were not looking for this particular giant,” Oei said. “It was a serendipitous discovery.”
At 16million light-years across, Alcyoneus is the largest structure ever discovered that was created by a single galaxy, Oei said.
It’s also one of the biggest objects ever found within the known universe.
Little is known about radio galaxies, and scientists had previously presumed that larger ones spawned from bigger black holes.
The new research turns this idea on its head, Oei said, as the black hole where Alcyoneus originated is nothing special.
Further research of the space giant will investigate whether radio galaxies grow as a result of their environment, rather than the properties of their host galaxies.
The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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In other news, a British woman has told of her horror after scammers used photos of a “silver fox” politician to trick her out of £80,000.
Norfolk County Council is suing Apple over what it says was misleading information about iPhone sales.
The creators of a chilling new horror game say that the title is so disturbing they’ve been forced to censor it on PlayStation.
And, Apple has announced updates to AirTags following claims that the coin-sized tracking devices are being used to stalk people.
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