ArsGeek

 Talk about your galactic star wars! Whatever the smaller galaxy did to deserve this beat down, hopefully we don’t follow suit. Hmm- I hope no one’s able to receive our television satellite transmissions, if so we’re all doomed and I wouldn’t blame them.

From Discovery News:

Galaxy Zapping Neighbor With Deathly Beam
Larry O’Hanlon, Discovery News

Dec. 17, 2007 — Astronomers have spotted a distant galaxy zapping its smaller neighbor with a deadly, Death Star-like particle beam.

The beam is a jet of particles moving at near light-speed out of a super-massive black hole at the center of the larger galaxy. The beam has smashed into the nearby second galaxy, where it is probably decimating an untold number of planets.

“There will be bad effects on Earth-like planets,” confirmed astronomer Daniel Evans of Harvard-Smithsonian Center.

On the other hand, the jet’s smashing into the other galaxy’s clouds of gas and dust could very well trigger the clouds to contract and give birth to new stars there, explained researcher Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K..

“Its long-term legacy is that it could produce a new generation of stars in the companion galaxy,” said Hardcastle. Both Hardcastle and Evans announced the discovery in a press teleconference on Monday, Dec. 17.

Either way, there’s strong evidence that the violence won’t last, said Hardcastle.

A wider view of the event shows that there are two hot spots a couple of million light-years apart, on either side of the galactic mugging. These are the ends of the black hole’s two polar jets, where they hit other material in intergalactic space.

The fact that the hot spot beyond the smaller galaxy is still lit up means it’s still getting zapped with material that was sent flying before the smaller galaxy moved into the way and interrupted the beam.

Since it takes about a million years for light-speed particles to traverse the distance to the hot spots, the still lit-up hot spot means the smaller galaxy has been feeling the heat for less than a million years, Hardcastle explained.

Interestingly, both galaxies are part of system called 3C321 that was identified as a source of radio emissions and catalogued decades ago, said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History.

Only now by combining the images of radio telescopes, the optical and ultraviolet eyes of Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, can researchers put together the entire violent story about this intergalactic mugging.

The coordinated use of such an array of diverse and powerful telescopes is one of the unheralded triumphs of modern physics, Tyson said. “This is an example of the triumph of that exercise.”