NASA telescope discovers Star Wars "TIE Fighter" look alike galaxy, stuns scientists

A few years ago, NASA astronomers had mapped a galaxy far with the help of radio waves. They soon discovered the object which is now called TXS 0128+554. In 2015, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reported that TXS 0128+554 is a faint source of gamma rays, which are the highest-energy form of light. Matthew Lister, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University in Indiana was the head researcher who led the project thereon. He stated in an interview with NASA that his team had started to zoom in a million times closer on this galaxy with the help of the radio telescope called Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). When these scientists saw the results, they immediately thought that it looked like Darth Vader’s TIE fighter spacecraft from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The TIE fighter is one of the most significant symbols of the Imperial Fleet.

Source: NASA

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Where is the galaxy TXS 0128 located?

A paper led by Lister was published in the August 25 issue of The Astrophysical Journal which stated that the TXS 0128 can be traced 500 million light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, which is anchored by a supermassive black hole about 1 billion times the Sun’s mass. The TXS 0128 has been classified as an active galaxy. There is a lot of extra energy in an active galaxy. This includes excess radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. A lot the emission in this galaxy is born from regions near its central black hole, where a swirling disk of gas and dust accumulates as well as heats up because of gravitational and frictional forces. 

Source: NASA

Here's what Darth Vader's TIE fighter looks like

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Why were bright radio emissions in TXS 0128?

Matthew Lister's paper also revealed that around one-tenth of active galaxies create a pair of jets or beams of high-energy particles which are travelling at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions. In the past, many astrophysicists and scientist have linked the presence of these jets to gamma rays. Many researchers went even claimed that these jets produced gamma rays.

If the collisions between, gases slow down or halt the outward motion of these hysteric jet particles, the materials will start flowing back towards the galaxy’s centre. This will results in broad regions, or lobes, which will be filled with fast-moving particles spiralling around the magnetic fields. These rapid particle interactions then create bright radio emission. 

Source: NASA

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The Fermi telescope has been able to identify over 3,000 active galaxies with the help of its Large Area Telescope. Nearly all of these galaxies are aligned so that one jet points almost directly at Earth, which boosts their signals. However, Lister's paper revealed that TXS 0128 is approximately 100,000 times less powerful than most of the other galaxies. In astronomical terms, TXS 0128 is still nearby Earth. In spite of that Fermi had to accumulate five years of data from the galaxy before reporting it as a gamma-ray source in 2015. 

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Why are gamma rays coming from TXS 0128 so dim?

After a preliminary research was done on TXS 0128, it was added to a long-running survey conducted by the VLBA, which is a huge network of radio antennas operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory stretching from Hawaii to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Following this, Lister's research team was able to procure a detailed map of TXS 0128 at different radio frequencies. The radio structures span 35 light-years across and tilt about 50 degrees out of our line of sight. This indicates that the jets aren’t pointed directly at us. Thus this explains why the galaxy is so dim in gamma rays.