The long reach of the Centaur's dark heart

By Phil Plait | May 16, 2012 7:21 am



[Click to galactinate, or get the 4000 x 4000 pixel version, or, if you're feeling frisky, cram this onto your hard drive: an image that's 8500 x 8400 pixels and 29 Mb in size! And trust me: you want to.]






The source of those jets is a gigantic black hole in the core of the galaxy. All big galaxies have one, but Cen A’s is 55 million times the mass of the Sun — nearly 14 times the mass of the black hole in the center of our own galaxy! So it’s a bruiser. Unlike our Milky Way’s black hole, the one in Cen A is actively feeding on material. A huge amount of gas is falling into it. As it does, it forms a flattened disk which gets very, very hot. Millions of degrees hot. Swirling magnetic fields and other forces focus the material into those twins beams which scream out from the disk and create the radio waves. We call these active galaxies.

That fits with the collision and cannibalism I mentioned above, too: the interaction dumped a vast amount of gas and dust into the center of Cen A, where the black hole was waiting to eagerly gobble it up. Or down, I guess.

And now finally I can point out the part that surprised me. While we’ve known about the jets in radio images for decades, you can actually see them in the ESO picture! Here’s a section of image showing the upper left part:

See? There is a faint, tight linear feature there at the lower right, roughly aligned with a fainter wider fan of material at the upper left (which itself has a tighter linear stream of material just below it; probably a continuation of that main beam to the lower right). The jet of matter blasting out from the black hole on this side of the galaxy has slammed into and compressed gas along the way, and that stuff has collapsed to form stars! The red glow is a dead giveaway; that’s the tell-tale sign of hydrogen gas being lit up by hot stars embedded in it. It looks to me that the features we see here are actually at the edge of where the jet is and not in the middle. That makes sense to me since the jet will push material out of the way, to the side, and that’s where it’ll collapse to form stars. [UPDATE: By accident, I think I found evidence of the same thing on the other side of the galaxy! In the 4000 x 4000 image, it's about 3240 pixels from the left side and 960 pixels up from the bottom -- a bit below the bright orange star in the right center of the image. There's faint red glow around it, and it's on a line with the bright linear feature discussed above. That is too cool.]

I didn’t know that was visible to "regular" telescopes, so that was a surprise to me (the matter compressed by the jets has been seen in optical light — the kind we see — before, but I don’t think this clearly or with such detail). I’ve written about this galaxy before (see Related Posts, below) but I’ve never seen this. As a matter of fact I’ve looked at dozens of Hubble images of Cen A, but as deep as those were they didn’t cover very much of the galaxy, so I never saw the jets. All you could see were thousands of stars, which was still pretty cool though.

But the idea that stars are forming due to those jets is amazing. We like to think of black holes as unmitigated sources of ultimate death and destruction, but that’s a bit unfair. In fact, they can be sources of creation on a vast scale; in this case, hundreds of thousands of light years.

Cen A is the nearest elliptical galaxy, and the nearest active galaxy to our own. That gives us a great view of its behavior, and it’s a test case for such objects. The fact that’s so weird just adds to the fun, And this new spectacular image shows that we still have a lot to see and learn from this galaxy… and a reminder to me to not take for granted something just because I’ve seen it so many times before.


Related Posts:

- A galaxy choked with dust
- Galaxy on edge
- Hubble grills a confused galaxy
- The roar of the Centaur

Comments (16)

  1. Jon Hanford

    Earlier this year a study of star formation in the inner jet of NGC 5128 (seen at lower right in the last picture above) was published based, in part, on some very cool-looking Hubble WFC3 & ACS images in the region of the jet:

    This galaxy also has other, hidden, surprises that astronomers are only now beginning to study. Did you know that NGC 5128 contains a tidal stream of young blue stars, unrelated to the jets, just north of the nucleus? Some stunning, specially processed deep images showing this ‘blue arc’, as well as the jet and shells in the outer halo of the galaxy, are included in a 2002 paper on the tidal stream(really, check it out *just* for the pics):

    Another hidden feature of this galaxy is a kiloparsec-scale stellar ring, hidden deep within the obscuring band of dust, but visible in infrared images:

    I like to think of Cen A as the galaxy that keeps on giving (or the AGN in our backyard). :D

  2. ctj

    if you look closely at the x-ray/microwave/visible composite image, you can barely see the linear feature. but what i find weirdest is that the large microwave lobe turns off to the right long before that thin blue line. i wonder if the jet is passing through a cloud of dust that is moving upward (using the orientation of the photos).

    do we know the spectrum of the red “voorwerp” at the upper left end of the jet? i know you say that red is a sign of hydrogen gas lit up by forming stars, but i wasn’t sure if the colors in the photo are accurate. is it chemically similar to hanny’s voorwerp?

  3. Kevin

    Would calculating the age of the jets tell us how long ago the merger took place?

  4. Peter Davey

    “The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

  5. Sean Walker

    Actually those optical jets you point out in the new image do not correspond at all to the radio image. Not doubting they are jets from the central black hole, just that when you register the optical and radio images shown here, these newly revealed jets are much further from the galaxy than the radio jets, implying that they may be much older and not emitting energy at radio wavelengths (at least not enough to be detected in the radio image).

  6. Dwight

    So what is that squiggly “S”-shaped dark region just below the center of the galaxy and by the edge of the envelope? Evidence of a Great Galactic Worm? Light bending around a Cosmic Super-String?

  7. morceli

    Centaurus A is referred to as an “active galaxy”. Is there a difference between an active galaxy and a quasar? Or is one simply a subset of the other? Same question would go for M87 and its jet, and why it isn’t consider a quasar. I’ve searched for an explanation but haven’t seen anything that very directly addressed it.

  8. Russell

    I was just thinking…

    While I was reading this article I knew the ending before I finished the story….that’s because I read BA all the time…and because of that I know what happens to galaxies when they collide. They get all bent up and stuff flies out of them and other stuff gets scrunched and radio waves happen and all kinds of neat things.

    I read BA…I know stuff :)

  9. Kate Ebneter

    Those filaments have been known for a long time — I think the first reference to them is Graham & Price (1978, although I can’t find the actual reference right this minute — might have actually been in Dufour & van den Bergh 1978 [Ap. J. Letters 226, L73]).

    (Sorry: My first published paper was a review article about Cen A. :-) [Ebneter & Balick 1983, PASP 95, 675])

  10. “Let us interrogate the great apparition that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire to what end is Nature.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

  11. Jay

    Well over at NASA on 04/24/12 there was an article on Messier 014, the Somberro where Spitzer took images and M104 is shown to be an elliptical galaxy as well with a dust lane that is more spread out. To summarize, Cent. A may be a younger version of Messier 104. Keyword is may, but I don’t think there is little room to say that M104 is not the spiral many have thought, but is in actuality an elliptical.

    In terms of how these galaxies (and in this case M104) form the article states the following:


    Here is a link to the article based on Spitzer images:

    Just found it interesting that Cent. A and M104 may have some things in common. The cool thing is that it will take further study and that is a good thing I think.

  12. Peter Davey

    The science-fiction writer, Stephen Baxter, once wrote that the place to look for really advanced civilisations was not in comparatively stable sections of the Universe, such as ours, but in more “extreme” areas, such as where galaxies were colliding, and the pressure to evolve or be destroyed was so much greater.

    “What doesn’t annihilate you, makes you stronger”?

  13. Wzrd1

    @5 Sean Walker, perhaps this jet residue is from a previous outburst from the galactic core, the galaxy continuing its motion and having the currently observed outburst?
    That would explain the shift from the radio observed emissions.

  14. Jon Hanford

    @14 Wzrd1, a 1983 study of the outer extensions of Cen A, using visible light, x-ray and radio observations, made a case for the probable precession of the jet (or alternatively, successive outbursts over time) to explain the observed alignments:…5..241H&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf


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