New, Strange and Rare Galaxy Emits Powerful Twin Jets

Astronomers may have found an important new example of a rare type of galaxy. The new finding could help shed light on how galaxies first developed in the early universe.

The strange, new galaxy is called J1649+2635 and is located nearly 800 million light-years from Earth. It's a spiral galaxy, like our own Milky Way, but possesses prominent jets of subatomic particles that are propelled outward from its core at nearly the speed of light.

"The conventional wisdom is that such jets come only from elliptical galaxies that formed through the merger of spirals," said Minnie Mao, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We don't know how spirals can have these large jets."

In fact, J1649+2635 is only the fourth jet-emitting spiral galaxy discovered so far. This means that the researchers need to find more of them in order to figure out how these jets can be produced by the "wrong" kind of galaxy.

Actually finding the galaxy wasn't easy. The astronomers turned to citizen scientists. The volunteers participated in a project called Galaxy Zoo, in which they looked at images from the visible-light Sloan Digital Sky Survey and classified the galaxies as spiral, elliptical or other types. In fact, so far more than 150,000 volunteers have classified 700,000 galaxies. In this case, the scientists used a "superclean" subset of more than 65,000 galaxies.

The astronomers then cross-matched visible-light spiral galaxies in a catalog that combined data from two other surveys. This revealed J1649+2635, which was classified as both a spiral galaxy with two powerful twin radio jets.

"This galaxy presents us with many mysteries," said Mao. We want to know how it became such a strange beast. Did it have a unique type of merger that preserved its spiral structure? Was it an elliptical that had another collision that made it re-grow spiral arms? Is its unique character the result of interaction with its environment? We will study it further, but in addition, we need to see if there are more like it."

The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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