Astral “J”

Credit: NASA, ESA and K. Cook (Lawrence Liv­er­more National Lab­o­ra­tory, USA)

What looks like a astral “J” is a com­bined view from NASA’s Hub­ble, Chan­dra and NRAO’s Very Large Array show­ing a galaxy clus­ter called M3735.6+7421 bound together by gravity.

The “J” in this far view is more than 1.5 mil­lion light-years tall and about 750,000 light-years wide. Astronomers sus­pect that a super­mas­sive black hole lurks in the cen­tral bright galaxy. The image, com­bin­ing views from the three tele­scopes, shows how black holes impact their sur­round­ings. The black hole in this galaxy clus­ter gen­er­ates some of the most pow­er­ful out­bursts seen in the uni­verse and is seen in the VLA radio image as red. The jets have smashed into the hot, dif­fuse gas sur­round­ing the the galaxy clus­ter. The hot, X-ray emit­ting gas glows blue in this image. The jets, mov­ing at nearly the speed of light, have punched two huge cav­i­ties into the sur­round­ing gas. Each cav­ity spans an area of about 640,000 light-years in diam­e­ter. That size of an area could con­tain about seven Milky Way Galaxies.

M3735.6+7421 lies about 2.6 bil­lion light-years away toward the faint north­ern con­stel­la­tion of Camelopardalis, the Giraffe.