Astronomers have known for years that huge stellar collisions can be quite a beautiful sight. But a recent discovery of a brand-new type of collision, between a streaming particle jet and a wandering cloud of dust and gas, is much more than just a pretty picture. Astronomers say the finding may add a great deal of information to their understanding of the ambiguous area surrounding black holes.

Using a series of radio telescopes collectively known as the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a group of astronomers has discovered a cosmic collision taking place 450 million light-years away in a galaxy near the constellation Orion. The collision involves a streaming plasma jet powered by the galaxys black hole, and an interstellar cloud of gas and dust which hovers just near the black hole.

Astronomers detected this odd collision while analyzing data from a streaming jet theyd been studying with the VLBAs radio telescopes. "We found a very unusual evolution for the radiation coming from the jet," said Jose-Luis Gomez, an astronomer at the Astrophysical Institute of Andalucia in Granada, Spain. "The best explanation we could find for our data came in the form of a jet-cloud interaction."

Streaming Jet

Click here to watch a computer simulation of a plasma jet emanating from a galaxy similar to 3C120.

Though previous observations have suggested that interstellar clouds of gas and dust may exist near galaxies with black holes areas of space so dense they suck up matter and light at enormous rates Gomezs data appears to be the first proof that these clouds can hover very near black holes. A paper by Gomez and several of his colleagues describing the find is featured in the September 29 issue of the journal Science.

The galaxy from which the observed jet is flowing is called 3C120 and is on the order of about 10 billion years old. Though the exact process of jet formation is poorly understood, scientists believe that disks of matter surrounding active black holes somehow use their black holes gravitational energy to speed up matter and shoot it out of the galaxy in the form of long plasma jets.