Washington - The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a "death star galaxy" blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy.
A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to NASA.
The telescope images show the bully galaxy shooting a stream of deadly radiation particles into the lower section of the other galaxy, which is about one-tenth its size. Both are about 8.2 billion trillion miles from here, orbiting around each other.
The larger galaxy has a multi-digit name but is called the "death star galaxy" by one of the researchers who discovered the galactic bullying, Daniel Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The jet attack is relatively new, in deep space time. It's estimated to be no more than 1 million years old and can stretch on for another 10 to 100 million years.
"A truly extraordinary act of violence," Evans said. "The jet violently slams into that lower half of the neighboring galaxy after which the jet dramatically twists and bends."
The two galaxies are only 24,000 light-years apart and are in a slow merging process. The jet has already traveled 1 million light-years. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.
go
