Merger generated Radio?
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by
Ptd
Is this BH being fed by a pair of merging galaxies? Or is that only what it looks like.
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by
JeanTate
in response to Ptd's comment.
It could well be, that there's some merger activity here, but I don't know how astronomers would go about showing that it's merger activity which is the direct cause of the nice #triple here. After all, in the heart of a galaxy cluster such as this, it's not at all unusual for more than one of the (often giant) ellipticals to have an AGN with radio jets and/or lobes.
And it sure seems like this is such an environment (centered on zsp 0.269 SDSS J083231.19+351713.5):
OT: several interesting-looking green things in the field!
Posted
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by
ivywong
scientist, admin
Certainly in mergers, you can quickly grow black holes by merging the central black holes in both galaxies. There are a handful of galaxies with double central black holes. This field looks like a distant cluster so we are really pushing to the limits of SDSS's resolution. I'd say that the jury is still out in terms of the merging stage between the 2 ellipticals. Imagine if you placed M87 and M86 from the Virgo Cluster at z~0.26, the separation between the 2 galaxies wouldn't be very much at that distance.
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