Astronomers Witness Galaxy Shanking Its Rival With a Beam of Radiation

In the cold, ancient reaches of the cosmos, two galaxies are duking it out in a battle that’s been raging for billions of years. But it’s not a fair fight, a team of astronomers recently found, as one of the galaxies is using a quasar to pierce the other, severely hampering its development. The team observed the “cosmic joust,” as they’ve dubbed the interaction, using Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The researchers witnessed something bizarre: one galaxy shooting a beam of radiation directly into another, disrupting its ability to form new stars. The team’s results, published today in Nature, offer a front-row seat to some of the most intense intergalactic violence the universe has to offer. The interaction is so distant that the light in the images took 11 billion years to reach us. The cosmic conflagration appears just as it did when the universe was just 18% of its current age. Though they ap ... Read full article.