WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A giant distant galaxy had a very human reaction to getting dumped on, NASA scientists said Tuesday: it blew up and then got a big knot in its belly.
Images taken by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory show galaxy 3C295 with three glowing knots of X-rays, one at its center and two more at its fringes.
Astronomers believe these knots formed in reaction to having vast quantities of gas from a surrounding hot cloud dumped on the galaxy over the ages.
A statement from the Chandra scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. called the reaction "cosmic payback."
Astronomers have known that 3C295 was shaken by a monster explosion about a million years ago, but now Chandra's observations indicate that the explosion is related to an extraordinary amount of matter being sucked into a massive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.
"In much the same way that a torrent of water pouring down a drain can produce a back pressure if the flow is more than the drain can handle, the enormous energy released by too much matter flowing into a black hole could trigger an explosion," the scientists said in the statement.
"Great quantities of matter and energy would be hurled back into the surrounding gas cloud, in a powerful payback for aeons of being dumped on by a cosmic bully."
The central X-ray knot may mark the spot of the ancient explosion, the scientists said.
The total X-ray power in all the knots is three times greater than all the power produced by the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth.
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