Hey Creationists, Over Here!
"Monstrous Black Hole Blast"
[RedOrbit.com]
This is galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.6 billion light-years away.
The image is actually three views of the region combined into one photo. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, it shows dozens of galaxies bound together by gravity.
Nearly 50 million degree gas permeates the space between the galaxies. The gas emits X-rays, seen as blue in the image.
The X-ray portion of the image shows enormous holes or cavities in the gas, each roughly 640,000 light-years in diameter -- nearly seven times the diameter of the Milky Way. The cavities are filled with charged particles gyrating around magnetic field lines and emitting radio waves shown in the red portion of image (taken with the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico).
The cavities were created by jets of charged particles, ejected at nearly light speed from a supermassive black hole weighing nearly a billion times the mass of our Sun, in the nucleus of the bright central galaxy.
The charged particles displaced more than one trillion solar masses worth of gas. The power required to displace the gas exceeded the power output of the Sun by nearly ten trillion times over the past 100 million years.
[X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. Waterloo/B.McNamara; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/Univ.]
Comments