‘Cosmic Joust’, the new space spectacle that has been recently discovered. This a kind of fight between two galaxies colliding and this phenomenon could be observed thanks to highly advanced technology used like telescopes. This cosmic event is a visual and revolutionary scene for the astronomy world.
This could be part of a scene of a science-fiction movie, but it is not. This is real life and it is happening in the universe. Let’s find out more about this comic spectacular discovery.
Galaxy!
Before getting deep into this scientific issue, we should have a clear concept of whats a galaxy is. A galaxy is a place in the universe with billions and billions of stars, planets, dust and more elements. Our planet Earth belongs to the Milky Way galaxy which may be a protagonist in a futur cosmic event similar to the one in this article.
The ‘Cosmic Joust’
‘Cosmic Joust’ is the named given to the cosmic event we are going to talk about now. Astronomers have seen in the constellation of Cancer a collision between two massive galaxies in a distance of 3.600 million light years from Earth.
These two galaxies are in a system called SDSS J0849+1114, a very easy name as most of scientific discoveries have. In the middle of this system astronomers found three supermassive black holes and each of them have a mass similar to millions of suns. They are between 10,000 and 30,000 light years of distance between each other, but it is expected the union of these black holes to create a triple one due to gravity in the future billion years.
The reason behind its name
This ‘Cosmic Joust’ is compared to an ancient medieval joust because one of the galaxies has a quasar – the brightest and most energetic elements in the universe powered by a supermassive black hole – which emmits radiation that affects the other galaxy. The affected galaxy won’t be able to produce as much new stars as before.
Now we can have a clear image of what is happening out there, just imagine two galaxies fighting each other.
How was this cosmic event observed?
This cosmic phenomenon was seen thanks to the highly advanced technology astronomers were able to use.
The first one is the Hubble Space Telescope, which allows perceiving the galaxies’ structures thanks to the visible light. Another technology used is the Chandra X-ray Observatory, was the one in charge of detecting x-ray emissions from the black holes.
A better understanding of the universe and our galaxy
This cosmic fight is very important for the scientific community because it helps them to keep learning about the different elements in the universe like the evolution of the galaxies, how stars are produced and supermassive black holes.
Not only this cosmic event is crucial for the universe ongoing study, but it is also important for our galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists estimate the Milky Way will join the Andromeda galaxy in about 4 billion years, not a too distance future.
What the cosmic event can teach us, average people
As previously mentioned, this discovery is important for scientists and their future researches, but what about us, people who don’t belong to the scientific world? It makes us closer to science and how the universe works because every time we see some news about science discoveries we tend to read them and we feel curious about it.
We may not be experts, but at least we are informed with basic information so that we can be in the debate too. Let’s keep searching about our planet and its surroundings, we don’t know what we could find out there!