Unexpected Black Hole 'Storm' Discovered in the Teacup Galaxy's Core

Scientists have uncovered a startling new discovery in the heart of what they thought was a "boring" galaxy. They've discovered a supermassive black hole explosively heating and blasting the gas in the galaxy, creating a type of galactic storm.

Two major types of galaxies are spirals, which are rich in gas and actively forming stars, and ellipticals, which are gas-poor and have very little star formation. Astronomers believe that ellipticals started life as active, star-forming galaxies, but then powerful jets and winds of material powered by the supermassive black holes at the galaxies' centers removed the raw, star-forming material.

"For many years, we've seen direct evidence of this happening in galaxies that are extremely bright when viewed through radio telescopes," said Chris Harrison, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These rare, radio-bright galaxies harbor powerful jets, launched at the black hole, that plow into the surrounding gas. However, to understand how all of galaxies in our universe formed, we needed to know if these same processes occur in less extreme galaxies that better represent the majority."

The researchers used the Very Large Array (VLA) to study a galaxy called J1430+1339, also known as the "Teacup." Located about 1.1 billion light-years from Earth, the galaxy has characteristics that are typical of galaxies with a central black hole consuming material.

With the new observations, the researchers saw that the galaxy had "bubbles" extending from 30,000 to 40,000 light-years on each side of its core, along with smaller jet-like structures, about 2,000 light-years in size. These jet-like structures showed that gas was being accelerated to speeds of up to about 1,000 kilometers per second.

"These radio observations have revealed that the central black hole is whipping up a storm at the center of this galaxy, by launching powerful jets that are accelerating the gas in the host galaxy and are colliding with the gas on larger scales," said Alasdair Thomson, one of the researchers. "This is the same kind of powerful process we'd previously seen in rare, extremely radio-luminous galaxies."

This galactic storms means that the jet-driven process may be far more typical than astronomers first thought. Currently, the researchers are now analyzing their data of eight more similar objects to see if they have similar characteristics.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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