Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Contour movement

  • Gopach by Gopach

    There seems to be a lot of movement in the contour. Could there be plasma movement between the galaxies?

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to Gopach's comment.

    This is a remarkable source! 😮

    Morphologically (by its shape), it's an unusual kind of radio galaxy, "X-shaped". I think we'd need a radio astronomer to comment on how such a shape likely formed.

    In any case, the host is SDSS J160038.95+205851.7, another giant elliptical galaxy, with a redshift of 0.174:

    enter image description here

    Could there be plasma movement between the galaxies?

    The space between galaxies is filled with plasma, and the shapes of the radio emissions reflects the interactions between this ambient plasma and the jets shooting out from the nuclei of the host galaxies. There's a recent Galaxy Zoo blog entry on research to better understand this, Making Radio Galaxies in a Computer

    Hope this helps. 😃

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    X-shaped (and S-shaped) radio galaxies are very unusual and interesting indeed. Astronomers have a few theories on how these can form. One way is through precessing jets and the other is via galaxy mergers. This link provides some information on the formation of X-shaped radio galaxies via mergers: http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2002/xmark/

    Posted