Source: Sci News

“After the Fermi announcement, we zoomed in a million times closer on the galaxy using the VLBA’s radio antennas and charted its shape over time,” Professor Lister said.

TXS 0128+554 hosts a supermassive black hole of around one billion solar masses, and is classified as an active galaxy, which means all its stars together can’t account for the amount of light it emits.

An active galaxy’s extra energy includes excess radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Astronomers think this emission arises from regions near the central black hole, where a swirling disk of gas and dust accumulates and heats up because of gravitational and frictional forces.

Around one-tenth of active galaxies produce a pair of jets, beams of high-energy particles traveling at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions.

Scientists think these jets produce gamma rays. In some cases, collisions with tenuous intergalactic gas eventually slow and halt the outward motion of jet particles, and the material starts to flow back toward the galaxy’s center.

This results in broad regions, or lobes, filled with fast-moving particles spiraling around magnetic fields. The particle interactions create bright radio emission.

Using the VLBA, a network of radio antennas stretching from Hawaii to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Professor Lister and colleagues created a detailed map of TXS 0128+554 at different radio frequencies.

The radio structure they revealed spans 35 light-years across and tilts about 50 degrees out of our line of sight. This angle means the jets aren’t pointed directly at us and may explain why the galaxy is so dim in gamma rays.

“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,” said Denison University’s Professor Daniel Homan, co-author of the study.

“This means we’re seeing the farther lobe at an earlier point in its evolution.”

“If TXS 0128+554 was aligned so the jets and lobes were perpendicular to our line of sight, all the light would reach Earth at the same time. We would see both sides at the same stage of development, which they are in reality.”

This illustration shows two views of the active galaxy TXS 0128+554. Left: the galaxy’s central jets appear as they would if we viewed them both at the same angle. The black hole, embedded in a disk of dust and gas, launches a pair of particle jets traveling at nearly the speed of light. Scientists think gamma rays (magenta) detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope originate from the base of these jets. As the jets collide with material surrounding the galaxy, they form identical lobes seen at radio wavelengths (orange). The jets experienced two distinct bouts of activity, which created the gap between the lobes and the black hole. Right: TXS 0128+554 appears in its actual orientation, with its jets tipped out of our line of sight by about 50 degrees. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The galaxy’s jets appear to have started around 80 years ago, as observed from Earth, and then stopped about 50 years later, leaving behind the unconnected lobes.

Then, roughly a decade ago, the jets turned on again, producing the emission seen closer to the core. What caused the sudden onset of these active periods remains unclear.

The radio emission also sheds light on the location of the galaxy’s gamma-ray signal.

Many theorists predicted that young, radio-bright active galaxies produce gamma rays when their jets collide with intergalactic gas.

But in TXS 0128+554’s case, at least, the particles in the lobes don’t produce enough combined energy to generate the detected gamma rays.

Instead, the authors thinks the galaxy’s jets produce gamma rays closer to the core, like the majority of active galaxies Fermi sees.

The team also observed TXS 0128+554 in X-rays using Chandra, looking for evidence of an enveloping cocoon of ionized gas.

While their measurements couldn’t confirm the presence or absence of a cocoon, there has been evidence for such structures in other active galaxies, like Cygnus A.

The observations do indicate TXS 0128+554 has a large amount of dust and gas surrounding its core, which is consistent with a highly inclined viewing angle.

“This galaxy reminds us of the importance of multiwavelength observations, looking at objects across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hays, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study.

“Fermi, the VLBA, and Chandra each add a layer to our growing picture of this object, revealing their own surprises.”

The findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

Source: Sci News