'Jellyfish' Galaxies Reveal Feeding Habits of Monster Black Holes

By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | August 16, 2017 01:15pm ET


Glowing "jellyfish" galaxies have revealed a new way to power some of the most powerful objects in the universe. The same process that feeds the most voracious black holes at the galactic centers may also create dangling "tentacles" of newborn stars, a new study found.

Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them, quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our sun. These powerful dynamos have fascinated astronomers since their discovery half a century ago.

In the 1930s, Karl Jansky, a physicist with Bell Telephone Laboratories, discovered that the static interference on transatlantic phone lines was coming from the Milky Way. By the 1950s, astronomers were using radio telescopes to probe the heavens, and pairing their signals with visible examinations of the heavens.

However, some of the smaller point-source objects didn't have a match. Astronomers called them "quasi-stellar radio sources," or "quasars," because the signals came from one place, like a star. Naming them didn't help determine what these objects were. It took years of study to realize that these distant specks, which seemed to indicate stars, are created by particles accelerated at velocities approaching the speed of light.

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