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Headline: Scientists Spot Star Wars 'Tie Fighter' In Space

Caption: PICTURE SHOWS: This illustration shows one of two views of the active galaxy TXS 0128+554, located around 500 million light-years away. This picture shows the galaxy appears in its actual orientation, with its jets tipped out of our line of sight by about 50 degrees. ... STORY COPY: Astronomers have mapped a galaxy far, far away using radio waves and found it has a strikingly familiar shape – that of a Tie Fighter from sci-fi film Star Wars. In the process, they discovered the object, called TXS 0128+554, experienced two powerful bouts of activity in the last century. Around five years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reported that TXS 0128+554 (TXS 0128 for short) is a faint source of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. Scientists have since taken a closer look using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. TXS 0128 lies 500 million light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, anchored by a supermassive black hole around 1 billion times the Sun’s mass. It’s classified as an active galaxy, which means all its stars together can’t account for the amount of light it emits. “After the Fermi announcement, we zoomed in a million times closer on the galaxy using the VLBA’s radio antennas and charted its shape over time,” said Matthew Lister, a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “The first time I saw the results, I immediately thought it looked like Darth Vader’s TIE fighter spacecraft from ‘Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.’ That was a fun surprise, but its appearance at different radio frequencies also helped us learn more about how active galaxies can change dramatically on decade time scales.” A paper describing the findings, led by Lister, was published in the Aug. 25 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is now available online. “The real-world universe is three-dimensional, but when we look out into space, we usually only see two dimensions,” said Daniel Homan, a co-author and professor of astronomy at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. “In this case, we’re lucky because the galaxy is angled in such a way, from our perspective, that the light from the farther lobe travels dozens more light-years to reach us than the light from the nearer one. This means we’re seeing the farther lobe at an earlier point in its evolution.” If the galaxy was aligned so the jets and lobes were perpendicular to our line of sight, all the light would reach Earth at the same time. We would see both sides at the same stage of development, which they are in reality. The galaxy’s apparent shape depends on the radio frequency used. At 2.3 gigahertz (GHz), about 21 times greater than the maximum broadcast frequency of FM radio, it looks like an amorphous blob. The TIE fighter shape emerges at 6.6 GHz. Then, at 15.4 GHz, a clear gap in the radio emission appears between the galaxy’s core and its lobes.

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