Astronomers recently took a deep look at NGC2663, a galaxy located roughly 93 million light-years away and containing many more stars than our own Milky Way galaxy. Thanks to astronomers from the Western Sydney University and them using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), it turns out that the galaxy ejects a huge jet of matter even larger than the galaxy itself, according to ScienceAlert.
A black hole is what shoots the jet throughout the Universe, to be more precise, and that stream of matter is about 50 times larger than its host galaxy. The jet measures about a million light-years across. That’s ten times the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy!
NGC2663 falls into the category of elliptical galaxies, and it’s located in the Pyxis constellation. That’s a relatively small and faint constellation located in the southern part of the sky. Despite this aspect, we’re talking about one of the 88 modern constellations. The plane of our Milky Way galaxy passes through Pyxis as well, which means that we could consider the latter a neighbor galaxy.
Some of the most important stars that exist in the Pyxis constellation are Alpha Pyxidis, Beta Pyxidis, Gamma Pyxidis, and Theta Pyxidis.
#Astronomers have detected huge black hole jets in the sky with diamonds ('shock diamonds' that is) the phenomenon, spanning more than a million light-years, emanates from 'nearby' Galaxy NGC2663 @ConversationEDU : https://t.co/QOwe6C5XRw pic.twitter.com/WEVPFQ98CA
— Remy Dean š“āā ļø (@DeanAuthor) August 19, 2022
An elliptical galaxy can be defined as a galaxy type that roughly has an ellipsoidal shape and also a smooth and nearly featureless shape. Elliptical galaxies also represent one of the four main classes described by the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Unsurprisingly, NASA’s Hubble telescope was named after the astronomer itself due to his major observations regarding the expansion of the Universe. In fact, Edwin Hubble was the first astronomer who found definitive proof that the Universe is indeed expanding.
Doctoral student Velibor VeloviÄ from Western Sydney University is the scientist who led the new research regarding the NGC2663 galaxy.
The new study was accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and you can check out a preprint here.
