Destructive Extreme Turbulance in Galaxy W2246-0526 is devouring galatic rub

In a far-off galaxy, 12.4 billion light-years from Earth, a ravenous black hole is devouring galactic grub. Its feeding frenzy produces so much energy, it stirs up gas across its entire galaxy.

Most glowing galaxy in the universe is going through a devastating destruction

Extreme turbulence in galaxy W2246-0526, also termed as the ‘most luminous galaxy’, could eject almost all the star-forming gas in it astronomers have noted. Galaxy W2246-0526 is 12.4 billion light years away and the data was analyzed from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Tanio Díaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile informed that the galaxy is so turbulent that it is ripping itself apart.

“It is like a pot of boiling water being heated up by a nuclear reactor in the center,” said Tanio Diaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, lead author of a new study about this galaxy.
Galaxy W2246-0526 is surrounded by a high-energy accretion disk which condenses and super-heats spirals of gas, with its energy coming from a supermassive black hole. According to Universidad Diego Portales researcher Roberto Assef, that makes W2246-0526 a “beast in the infrared.” Regarding its turbulent nature, he added that the infrared energy given off by the dust wall “has a direct and violent impact on the entire galaxy,” resulting in extreme turbulence. As such, Assef and colleagues believe that it might not be long before the so-called most luminous galaxy reaches its end.

While the term “obscure quasar” could be used to describe the galaxy codenamed W2246-0526, it could also be classified as a “Hot DOG” – that’s an acronym for Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxy. The galaxy is so bright, yet surrounded by a thick dust barrier, that it falls into this category, where one out of 3,000 quasars is classified as such.
The new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveals that this galaxy is also expelling tremendously turbulent gas — a phenomenon never seen before in an object of this kind.

“This galaxy is tearing itself apart,” said Roberto Assef, astronomer with the Universidad Diego Portales and leader of the observing team at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. “The momentum and energy of the particles of light deposited in the gas are so great that they are pushing the gas out in all directions.”

Using ALMA, astronomers found large amounts of ionized carbon in a very turbulent state throughout the entire galaxy. The galaxy formed a little over 1 billion years after the big bang.
The astronomers used ALMA to precisely map the motion of ionized carbon atoms throughout the entire galaxy. These atoms, which are tracers for interstellar gas, naturally emit infrared light, which becomes shifted to millimeter wavelengths as it travels the vast cosmic distances to Earth due to the expansion of the Universe.

“Large amounts of ionized carbon were found in an extremely turbulent dynamic state throughout the galaxy,” Díaz-Santos describes. The data reveal that this interstellar material is careening anywhere from 500 to 600 kilometers per second throughout the entire galaxy.

The astronomers believe that this turbulence is primarily due to the fact that the region around the black hole is at least 100 times more luminous than the rest of the galaxy combined; in other quasars, the proportion is much more modest. This intense yet localized radiation exerts tremendous pressure on the entire galaxy, to potentially devastating effect.

“We suspected that this galaxy was in a transformative stage of its life because of the enormous amount of infrared energy discovered with WISE,” said Peter Eisenhardt with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Now ALMA has shown us that the raging furnace in this galaxy is making the pot boil over.”

Current models of galactic dynamics combined with the ALMA data indicate that this galaxy is unstable and its interstellar gas is being blown away in all directions. This suggests that the galaxy’s Hot DOG days are numbered as it matures into a more traditional unobscured quasar.

“If this pattern continues, it is possible that in the future W2246 ends up shedding a large part of the gas and dust it contains,” concludes Manuel Aravena also from the Universidad Diego Portales. “Only ALMA, with its unparalleled resolution, can allow us to see this object in high definition and fathom such an important episode in the life of this galaxy.”

The black hole’s event horizon is thought to be one million times smaller than the W2246-0526 galaxy, yet the energy emitted by the black hole’s swallowing of material affects gas thousands of light-years away from it.

While turbulence has been detected in gas around supermassive black holes before – for example, around the centers of some nearby luminous galaxies that host active galactic nuclei – those winds are found to flow in specific directions. This is the first time that highly turbulent gas has been found across the entire galaxy.

“The ‘boiling’ gas is not in the accretion disk. The whole galaxy is being disturbed,” said Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for WISE, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Researchers are unsure whether the gas is being pushed out strongly enough to leave the galaxy entirely, or if it will eventually fall back.

“A likely finale would be that the galaxy will blow out all of the gas and dust that is surrounding it, and we would see the accretion disk without its dust cover — what we call a quasar,” Assef said.
This galaxy is an example of a rare class of objects called Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxies or Hot DOGs, which are powerful galaxies with supermassive black holes in their centers. Only 1 out of every 3,000 galaxies that WISE has observed is in this category.

The WISE mission was essential to finding this galaxy because the galaxy is covered in dust, obscuring its light from visible-wavelength telescopes. The dust shifts the light from the galaxy into the infrared range, to which WISE is attuned.

JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011, after it scanned the entire sky twice, thereby completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA’s efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.