Starship Asterisk*

bactame wrote:

geckzilla wrote:
Oh, interesting. Even before reading the description I was dubious about naming them jets. If it is more likely that they are star streams with a coincidentally jet-shaped pattern, is it really appropriate to call them jets?

Geckzilla quetions calling them jets: "is it really appropriate to call them jets?" Vapor trails might do as well since they lines of faint stars presumably formed eons ago from tidal tails of small galaxies which interacted with NGC 1097. These jets though are pretty hard to see in the colored images but show up readily in the old black and white images. Good ole faint stars are the kinds we all like the most...kinda reminds you of home and mom & dad.

Beyond wrote:
I was waiting to see if anyone commented on the one in the 3 o'clock position that seems to make a 90' turn. I thought that was a bit strange. What in space makes right angles?

neufer wrote:

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Beyond wrote:
I was waiting to see if anyone commented on the one in the 3 o'clock position that seems to make a 90' turn. I thought that was a bit strange. What in space makes right angles?

Are you talking about the line artifact
(like the one in the upper left corner?)

Beyond wrote:

neufer wrote:

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Beyond wrote:
I was waiting to see if anyone commented on the one in the 3 o'clock position that seems to make a 90' turn. I thought that was a bit strange. What in space makes right angles?

Are you talking about the line artifact
(like the one in the upper left corner?)

Hmm... i don't see anything in the upper left corner. In your picture it's labeled Jet 2.

Ron-Astro Pharmacist wrote:
Do active galatic bi-nuclei exist? Two supermassive black holes with dual jets. Get out your gravitational wave dectectors

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/monster-black-holes.html wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Zoom into Markarian 739, a nearby galaxy hosting two monster black holes.
Using NASA's Swift and Chandra, astronomers have shown that both black holes
are producing energy as gas falls into them. The object is only the second-known
binary active galactic nucleus within half-a-billion light-years. (Animation begins
with visible light view of Markarian 739 and transitions into an artistic rendering
of the two black holes. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Nearby Galaxy Boasts Two Monster Black Holes, Both Active
NASA Swift, 06.10.11

<<A study using NASA's Swift satellite and the Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a second supersized black hole at the heart of an unusual nearby galaxy already known to be sporting one. The galaxy, which is known as Markarian 739 or NGC 3758, lies 425 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. Only about 11,000 light-years separate the two cores, each of which contains a black hole gorging on infalling gas. The study will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"At the hearts of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, lies a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass," said Michael Koss, the study's lead author at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland in College Park (UMCP). "Some of them radiate billions of times as much energy as the sun."

Astronomers refer to galaxy centers exhibiting such intense emission as active galactic nuclei (AGN). Yet as common as monster black holes are, only about one percent of them are currently powerful AGN. Binary AGN are rarer still: Markarian 739 is only the second identified within half a billion light-years.

Since 2004, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) aboard Swift has been mapping high-energy X-ray sources all around the sky. The survey is sensitive to AGN up to 650 million light-years away and has uncovered dozens of previously unrecognized systems. Follow-up studies by Koss and colleagues published in 2010 reveal that about a quarter of the Swift BAT AGN were either interacting or in close pairs, with perhaps 60 percent of them poised to merge in another billion years. "If two galaxies collide and each possesses a supermassive black hole, there should be times when both black holes switch on as AGN," said coauthor Richard Mushotzky, professor of astronomy at UMCP. "We weren't seeing many double AGN, so we turned to Chandra for help."

For decades, astronomers have known that the eastern nucleus of Markarian 739 contains a black hole that is actively accreting matter and generating prodigious energy. The Chandra study shows that its western neighbor is too. This makes the galaxy one of the nearest and clearest cases of a binary AGN. The distance separating the two black holes is about a third of the distance separating the solar system from the center of our own galaxy. The dual AGN of Markarian 739 is the second-closest known, both in terms of distance from one another and distance from Earth. However, another galaxy known as NGC 6240 holds both records.

How did the second AGN remain hidden for so long? "Markarian 739 West shows no evidence of being an AGN in visible, ultraviolet and radio observations," said coauthor Sylvain Veilleux, a professor of astronomy at UMCP. "This highlights the critical importance of high-resolution observations at high X-ray energies in locating binary AGN.">>

Historycalling wrote:My question is, 'Why are the 'jets' straight when the arms of the galaxy show definate evidence of rotational forces? One would have thought that if the jets wee associated with the galaxy they too would show rotational forces. To me at least it simple doesn't make sense that straight jet lies can come out of an object that is rotating.

ems57fcva wrote:It looks to me like a lot of gas and dust are being pulled into the center of the galaxy. Indeed there is a ring around the central object that may well be an accretion disk.

Chris Peterson wrote:

ems57fcva wrote:It looks to me like a lot of gas and dust are being pulled into the center of the galaxy. Indeed there is a ring around the central object that may well be an accretion disk.

Nope. There is no mechanism to pull anything into the center. And an accretion disc around a central massive black hole would be too small to see at this scale by orders of magnitude- smaller than one pixel.

ems57fcva wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

ems57fcva wrote:It looks to me like a lot of gas and dust are being pulled into the center of the galaxy. Indeed there is a ring around the central object that may well be an accretion disk.

Nope. There is no mechanism to pull anything into the center. And an accretion disc around a central massive black hole would be too small to see at this scale by orders of magnitude- smaller than one pixel.

That ring has all of the hallmarks of an accretion disk in so far as I am concerned. What makes an accretion disk? Is it not the angular momentum of a large enough amount of gas and dust getting squeezed together as it heads into a central object? And just look at the dust lanes, how they turn into that ring! It speaks to me of infalling gas and dust being sent into a large orbit around the central object.

I will not say that your comment about the usual accretion disk is much off-base however. If it is an accretion disk, then oh-my-God the amount of matter that must be moving towards the central object to create it! It fits my paradigm, but even in that case it is very mind-boggling. I wonder what measurements can be made that could make (or break) my point. If there are massive amounts of gas on the move there (albeit without all that much speed given how far from the central object the ring structure is), there should be some was to say if it really is infalling and at what rate.