Plasma Jets from Radio
Galaxy Hercules A
From
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
Why does this galaxy
emit such spectacular jets? No one is sure, but it is likely related to an
active supermassive black hole at its center.
The galaxy at the image center, Hercules A, appears to be a relatively normal elliptical galaxy in visible light.
When imaged in radio waves, however, tremendous plasma jets over one million light years long
appear.
Detailed analyses
indicate that the central galaxy, also known as 3C 348, is actually over 1,000 times more massive than
our Milky Way Galaxy, and the central black hole is nearly 1,000 times more
massive than the black hole at our Milky Way's center.
Pictured below is a visible light image obtained by the
Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope superposed with a radio image taken by the
recently upgraded Very
Large Array (VLA) of radio
telescopes in New Mexico, USA.
The physics that
creates the
jets remains a topic of
research with a likely energy source being infalling matter swirling toward the central black hole.
