2000 Peacock launched the Star Legend series and introduced Redi, played by Vin Diesel to the world . In the first movie, when an micrometeor star destroys the hull, Reedy is transported to Hunter Grazna. The crew and passengers landed on a nearby planet where they encountered alien predators who only appeared in the darkness. While most drifters are affected by biological and penetrating darkness, Reedi can be seen, thanks to surgically modified eyes.
Through our limited vision, we are equally protected on the earth from horrors hidden in the darkness—in this case, horror itself. What we have is not surgically modified eyes, but telescopes that can peek into the darkness and see the frequency of light we cannot see. We have teamwork. Recently, a team of citizen scientists in India discovered an unusual cosmic horror that emerged in the form of monster black holes that weakened the ability of neighboring galaxies to form stars.
Citizen Science Use the power of the Internet to crowdsource scientific discoveries. Some platforms, such as Zooniverse, allow anyone with a computer or smartphone to view astronomical images and help classify them. The idea is to identify potentially interesting subjects that may lead to further research. The good thing about something like Zooniverse is that it can be easily accessed by anyone without spending too much time or effort. The downside is that you can only use your own equipment without expert training or guidance. Dr Ananda Hota, an astronomer at the University of Mumbai, created his own citizen science program in 2013, which requires more hands-on work.
This group mainly exists on Facebook, with 4,700 members publishing images, discussing images and learning radio astronomy . Once users demonstrate an understanding of the basics, they are transferred to another Facebook group where they start to understand the research work. RAD@home also brings people from all over India to conduct a 7-world powerful advanced training program before they return to larger groups and share their new skills with the group.
About nine years ago, the team discovered something strange. Billions of light years away, two elliptical galaxies are trapped in each other's gravitational dance, and one galaxy kills its partner. Inside one of the galaxies is a huge black hole that is spewing a powerful stream of plasma to its neighbors. Even more strangely, it seems to target neighboring galaxies first.
"Usually, the jet is bipolar, but here we only see one side emitted to the adjacent galaxy. So this is either the case where the radio jet is one side, or there is an unresolved structure with curved jets... Based on the current data, we can't say completely confidently, so we need to follow up on very high resolution imaging," Dabhade told SYFY WIRE.
The image of this object, known as RAD12, is made by combining visible light (light produced by stars) with a radio frequency that reveals the structure that is invisible to the human eye. There may be another jet that spews out from the other side, which is indeed what we expect to see, but it doesn't appear in the image either because it's beyond what the telescope can see, or because it's blocked or distorted by something else. In the future, imaging with more powerful telescopes can solve this mystery. Meanwhile, the plasma jets we see are completely destroying neighboring galaxies.
Understanding what is happening between these two galaxies can greatly help to understand why we don't see more stars in the sky than we do. This black hole that ejects plasma, sometimes called the active galaxy nucleus, or AGN, may be the cause of the decline in productivity in some galaxies.
"We expect more massive galaxies and more star formation, but in our observations we do not see more massive and active star formation galaxies. One of the reasons is the active galaxy nucleus.The ability of the gas body to be driven out of the host galaxy, thus inhibiting its ability to collapse, cool and form stars,” Vardy said.
When the plasma beam leaves the black hole at a speed close to the speed of light, it contacts the gas clouds adjacent to the galaxy and bounces back to its origin. However, before that, it pushes the gas that initially compresses it but eventually scatters it out of the Milky Way . The result is the initial burst of stars produced by gas compression, but the brief burst is the last dawn before darkness. In the long run, gas storage within the galaxy will become thinner and driven out of the galaxy, and the formation of stars will slow down to a trickle.
"When the radio jet hits the galaxy along the way, it not only heats or drains the gas from the galaxy, but the jet itself also deforms. Trained citizen scientists can effectively identify the deviation of jet structure from standard shape. That's how RAD @home Citizen scientists combine radio and optical data to discover RAD12," Hota said.
Assuming future observations confirm this discovery, we may see a galaxy homicide in progress, which can confirm why we haven't seen as many stars forming galaxies as we expected. In awe and fear, it's hard not to doubt what the next generation of telescopes and the next generation of citizen scientists might find.
