Posted on 11/17/2015 10:55:45 AM PST by Red Badger
Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum & C. O’Dea (RIT), R. Perley & W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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Scientists often use the combined power of multiple telescopes to reveal the secrets of the Universe – and this image is a prime example of when this technique is strikingly effective.
The yellow-hued object at the centre of the frame is an elliptical galaxy known as Hercules A, seen by the Earth-orbiting NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In normal light, an observer would only see this object floating in the inky blackness of space.
However, view Hercules A with a radio telescope, and the entire region is completely transformed. Stunning red–pink jets of material can be seen billowing outwards from the galaxy – jets that are completely invisible in visible light. They are shown here as seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, USA. These radio observations were combined with the Hubble visible-light data obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 to create this striking composite.
The two jets are composed of hot, high-energy plasma that has been flung from the centre of Hercules A, a process that is driven by a supermassive black hole lurking at the galaxy's heart. This black hole is some 2.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, and around a thousand times more massive than the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.
Hercules A's black hole heats material and accelerates it to nearly the speed of light, sending it flying out into space at phenomenally high speeds. These highly focused jets lose energy as they travel, eventually slowing down and spreading out to form the cloud-like lobes seen here.
The multiple bright rings and knots seen within these lobes suggest that the black hole has sent out numerous successive bursts of material over the course of its history. The jets stretch for around 1.5 million light-years – roughly 15 times the size of the Milky Way.
Hercules A, also known as 3C 348, lies around two billion light-years away. It is one of the brightest sources of radio emission outside our Galaxy.
Explore further: A multi-wavelength view of radio galaxy Hercules A
“The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billion light years or 4.40 x 1026 meters) in any direction.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Size
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“In standard cosmology, comoving distance and proper distance are two closely related distance measures used by cosmologists to define distances between objects. Proper distance roughly corresponds to where a distant object would be at a specific moment of cosmological time, which can change over time due to the expansion of the universe. Comoving distance factors out the expansion of the universe, giving a distance that does not change in time due to the expansion of space (though this may change due to other, local factors such as the motion of a galaxy within a cluster).
Comoving distance and proper distance are defined to be equal at the present time; therefore, the ratio of proper distance to comoving distance now is 1. At other times, the scale factor differs from 1. The Universe’s expansion results in the proper distance changing, while the comoving distance is unchanged by this expansion because it is the proper distance divided by that scale factor.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance
Meh. Who knows what our galaxy looks like from a couple billion light-years away?
“corresponds to where a distant object would be at a specific moment of cosmological time, which can change over time due to the expansion of the universe.”
I think I know what they mean now. For example, when we observe this galaxy it is where it WAS 2 billion years ago. But due to the expansion of the universe it is actually much further away than that now.
“Comoving distance is the distance between two points measured along a path defined at the present cosmological time.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance#Comoving_distance_and_proper_distance
“You must unlearn what you have learned.â€
Bookmark.
“In the beginning, God....”
From this point it becomes increasingly interpretational.
Exactly!
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