NASA has found a new galaxy that reminds scientists of “Star Wars.”
What happened:
NASA has found an active galaxy nearly 500 million light years away from Cassiopeia. So yeah, that’s a galaxy far, far away, according to new research published in the Astrophysical Journal.
- The galaxy — called TXS 0128+554 — is an active galaxy that emits more life than all of the stars within the galaxy altogether. That’s so much light.
- TXS 0128+554 was originally discovered in 2015 through gamma rays. But scientists haven’t had a full grasp of what it looked like until now.
Matthew Lister, Purdue University professor and lead author of the study that examined the galaxy, said it reminded him of “Star Wars.”
- “We zoomed in a million times closer on the galaxy using the (Very Long Baseline Array’s) radio antennas and charted its shape over time. The first time I saw the results, I immediately thought it looked like Darth Vader’s TIE fighter spacecraft from ‘Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.’ That was a fun surprise, but its appearance at different radio frequencies also helped us learn more about how active galaxies can change dramatically on decade time scales.”
Why it looks like ‘Star Wars’
- The galaxy slightly looks like a TIE fighter. This is because of the galaxy has a massive black hole that is 1 billion times the sun’s mass, Fox News reports.
- The galaxy is also releasing two jets of energy particles traveling at the speed of light in opposite directions, which look like wings of the TIE fighter.
- Daniel Homan, a co-author and professor of astronomy at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, said in a statement: “The real-world universe is three-dimensional, but when we look out into space, we usually only see two dimensions. In this case, we’re lucky because the galaxy is angled in such a way, from our perspective, that the light from the farther lobe travels dozens more light-years to reach us than the light from the nearer one. This means we’re seeing the farther lobe at an earlier point in its evolution.”