Pic of the Week: Dwarf Starburst Galaxy Henize 2-10

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Image (Credit): Dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10. (NASA, ESA, Zachary Schutte (XGI), Amy Reines (XGI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s photo is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the Dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10, which lies 34 million light years away. NASA notes that “The bright region at the center, surrounded by pink clouds and dark dust lanes, indicates the location of the galaxy’s massive black hole and active stellar nurseries.”

The image below better illustrates the link between the massive black hole and the related star formation. NASA explains:

A pullout of the central region of dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 traces an outflow, or bridge of hot gas 230 light-years long, connecting the galaxy’s massive black hole and a star-forming region. Hubble data on the velocity of the outflow from the black hole, as well as the age of the young stars, indicates a causal relationship between the two. A few million years ago, the outflow of hot gas slammed into the dense cloud of a stellar nursery and spread out, like water from a hose impacting a mound of dirt. Now clusters of young stars are aligned perpendicular to the outflow, revealing the path of its spread.

Image (Credit): Dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 with a pullout showing the black hole and related star formation. (NASA, ESA, Zachary Schutte (XGI), Amy Reines (XGI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

Black Holes in the Center of Galaxies are More Common Than We Thought

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Image (Credit): An artist’s drawing a stellar black hole named Cygnus X-1. (NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)

We already knew a supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy and others like it, but what about dwarf galaxies? SciTechDaily reports that astronomers in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Department of Physics & Astronomy have found that large black holes are also more common than previously thought in dwarf galaxies.

The astronomers developed a new way to identify such black holes and found that about 80 percent of all black holes found in dwarf galaxies could be found in this way. These smaller black holes may help to create the supermassive black holes we see in larger galaxies as the dwarf galaxies collide and combine to make the larger galaxies.

Professor Sheila Kannappan, Polimera’s Ph.D. advisor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and coauthor of the study, stated:

We’re still pinching ourselves…We’re excited to pursue a zillion follow-up ideas. The black holes we’ve found are the basic building blocks of supermassive black holes like the one in our own Milky Way. There’s so much we want to learn about them.

While even Albert Einstein had doubts that his theoretical black hole could exist in reality, astronomers continue to find they are a larger part of the universe than anyone expected. When you consider smaller stellar black holes, the figure is enormous. As NASA noted:

Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.

The Black Hole Sagittarius A*

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Image (Credit): The first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. (EHT Collaboration)

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array linking together eight existing radio observatories across the planet, has created the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Named Sagittarius A* after a radio signal coming from a location in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius (the A and * came later), the black hole is 27,000 light-years away and estimated to be four million times more massive than our Sun. The presence of the black hole was not in question, but capturing an image such as this took many years of work.

A press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) quoted EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei:

We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity…These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.

For more on the recent breakthrough, you may want to view the ESO Press Conference on the new Milky Way results from the EHT team (here on Youtube), which is followed by a public question and answer event.

Most Distant Galaxy on Record

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Image (Credit): This timeline illustrates the earliest galaxy candidates as well as the history of the universe.(Harikane et al., NASA, EST and P. Oesch/Yale)

Just recently I posted about the discovery of the farthest star. Well, now astronomers have spotted the farthest galaxy. The Harvard Gazette reports that a galaxy named HD1 appears to be about 13.5 billion light-years away and may contain the universe’s first stars or even the earliest black hole discovered to date. The contents of this galaxy is still being studied (and theorized).

The story quotes Fabio Pacucci, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who was involved in the discovery, who stated:

Answering questions about the nature of a source so far away can be challenging… It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from the flag it flies, while being faraway ashore, with the vessel in the middle of a gale and dense fog. One can maybe see some colors and shapes of the flag, but not in their entirety. It’s ultimately a long game of analysis and exclusion of implausible scenarios.

More review of the data as well as updated data from the James Webb Space Telescope at some point in the future should help to answer questions related to this galaxy.

You can read more about this discover in the Astrophysical Journal. You may also be interested in the accompanying paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters,

Podcast: Joe Rogan and Brian Cox

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Source/Credit: The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube.

While Joe Rogan has been in some hot water recently, I think we can agree that many of his broadcasts were less controversial and simply fun. He is a good host with plenty of though-provoking questions. I do not want to get into politics, but rather focus on science. And in that case, his two-and-a-half hour discussion on January 28, 2019 with Professor Brian Cox, English physicist and Professor of Particle Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK, was a terrific way to go over both astronomy and physics.

Some of the topics covered during their talk included the size and complexity of the universe, black holes, wormholes, time travel, the Fermi Paradox, unknown objects at the edge of our solar system, space travel, lasers in space, and the role of artificial intelligence in society. The forum provided plenty of time to cover a large range of topics. It is well worth dropping in and listening.

Some other discussions worth watching include Joe Rogan’s August 22, 2018 discussion with Neil deGrasse Tyson and his May 7, 2020 discussion with Elon Musk.