Quasar Jet as long as our Galaxy

2 Comments by Alexander Phillips on 3rd Jan 11

Captured by NASA's Chandra telscope, this image shows a collosal jet of particles emitting from a Quasar ( atype of upermassive black hole). Image courtesy of http://www.dailygalaxy.com

This NASA image (captured by the Chandra, Spitzer and the Hubble Telescope) may look like something out of that trippy, hippy, “woah man, check out those colours” scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the truth is hardly less amazing. The colourful jet depicted represent a mindboggling distance of 100,000 light years, which means that it is about the same legth as our very own Milky Way galaxy! The object from which this beast is being emitted? A super-massive blackhole type-thing called a Quasar, the first one ever discovered in fact (1963), and christened – rather boringly – 3C273. The guys over at The Daily Galaxy say the following:

A kaleidoscope of colors represents the jet’s assorted light waves. X-rays, the highest-energy light in the image, are shown at the far left in blue (the black hole itself is well to the left of the image). Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe. They consist of supermassive black holes surrounded by turbulent material, which is being heated up as it is dragged toward the black hole. This hot material glows brilliantly, and some of it gets blown off into space in the form of powerful jets.

Astronomers were able to use these data sets to solve the mystery of how light is produced is quasar jets -the result of charged particles spiraling through a magnetic field, a process known as synchrotron radiation.

Check out this video entitled “The Largest Black Holes in he Universe”, which will tell you more about Quasars, or “Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources’ if your an uber-geek.