Astronomers Witness Galaxy Shanking Its Rival With a Beam of Radiation
In the cold, ancient reaches of the cosmos, two galaxies are duking it out in a battle that's been raging for billions of years. But it's not a fair fight, a team of astronomers recently found, as one of the galaxies is using a quasar to pierce the other, severely hampering its development.
The team observed the 'cosmic joust,' as they've dubbed the interaction, using Chile's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The researchers witnessed something bizarre: one galaxy shooting a beam of radiation directly into another, disrupting its ability to form new stars. The team's results, published today in Nature, offer a front-row seat to some of the most intense intergalactic violence the universe has to offer.
The interaction is so distant that the light in the images took 11 billion years to reach us. The cosmic conflagration appears just as it did when the universe was just 18% of its current age. Though they appear plain and inert in the above image, the galaxies are actually hurtling towards one another at over 311 miles per second (500 kilometers per second).
'We discovered a quasar—likely triggered by the merging of two galaxies—that is actively transforming the gas structure in its companion galaxy,' Pasquier Noterdaeme, a CNRS researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and lead author of the paper, told Gizmodo in an email. 'The idea that galaxy mergers give rise to quasars has long been proposed, mainly supported by statistical studies of host galaxy morphologies,' Noterdaeme added. 'In our case, we caught the two galaxies in the act.'
The team found that radiation from one galaxy's quasar—an active galactic core powered by a supermassive black hole—was disrupting regions in the other galaxy. That energy is shooting straight into the other galaxy like a lance, slicing through clouds of gas and dust. Because of the disturbance, the researchers say, the regions are probably too small to form new stars; the quasar-wielding galaxy effectively sabotaged its opponent's ability to birth new light.
'We see for the first time the effect of a quasar's radiation directly on the internal structure of the gas in an otherwise regular galaxy,' said Sergei Balashev, co-lead author of the study and a researcher at the Ioffe Institute in Russia, in an ESO release.
But the galaxy with the quasar isn't just chipping away at the other—it's also transforming itself. As the galaxies brush past one another, the interaction funnels gas toward the quasar's central black hole, fueling it for more violent outbursts.
The unique interaction was made visible thanks to ALMA's high resolution, which allowed astronomers to see that the light source in deep space was actually two galaxies (previous observations made the closely spaced objects appear as a single entity). ESO's X-shooter scrutinized the quasar's light, helping the researchers understand how the radiation affected the other galaxy.
There's more to discover beyond the horizon—and I'm not talking about the event horizon. Instruments like the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) could let scientists dissect even more of these ancient galactic brawls, giving us a clearer picture of how quasars shape the galaxies they live in—and destroy the ones they don't.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
4 hours ago
- Washington Post
What made Mount Etna's latest eruption so rare
MILAN — Mount Etna, the volcano that towers over eastern Sicily, has again captivated the world with a spectacular show , spewing smoke and high into the sky. But the defining event of Monday's eruption was the more rare pyroclastic flow from the southwestern crater not visible from a distance.
Geek Wire
4 hours ago
- Geek Wire
Software suggests Rubin Observatory will discover millions of solar system objects in its first year
A new type of computer simulation predicts that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will discover 2.85 million previously undetected objects in the solar system in its first year of operation, with millions more to be spotted in the years that follow. The discovery campaign, which is due to begin in earnest later this year, should expand the known population of small bodies in the solar system by a factor of four to nine, said University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the research team behind the open-source Sorcha simulation software. 'With this data, we'll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth,' Juric said today in a news release. Several studies describing the software and the predictions have been accepted for publication by The Astronomical Journal. The project was led by researchers from Queen's University Belfast in collaboration with colleagues from UW, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The software's name is derived from the Gaelic word for 'brightness.' Sorcha starts with the Rubin Observatory's planned observing schedule, factors in how the telescope makes its observations, and matches up those capabilities with the best model for the current state of the solar system and its reservoirs of small bodies such as asteroids. 'Accurate simulation software like Sorcha is critical,' said Queen's University astronomer Meg Schwamb, who led the research team. 'It tells us what Rubin will discover and lets us know how to interpret it. Our knowledge of what objects fill Earth's solar system is about to expand exponentially and rapidly.' The software suggests that, over the course of a 10-year campaign known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, Rubin will map more than 5 million main-belt asteroids, 127,000 near-Earth objects, 109,000 Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit, 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects and about 2,000 orbit-crossing objects known as Centaurs. Jake Kurlander, a UW doctoral student who's the principal author of one of the studies, said Rubin's observations should double the number of known asteroids in the solar system in less than a year. 'Rubin's unparalleled combination of breadth and depth make it a uniquely effective discovery machine,' he said. The observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope — which is named after the family of Seattle software pioneer Charles Simonyi — is designed to observe small bodies multiple times using different optical filters, revealing their surface colors. Past solar system surveys typically made observations using a single filter. 'With the LSST catalog of solar system objects, our work shows that it will be like going from black-and-white television to brilliant color,' said Joe Murtagh, a doctoral student at Queen's University. The Rubin Observatory team has already started making preliminary observations and will share some of those early images at a First Look event on June 23. Check out for more information about the Sorcha simulation software. The Rubin Observatory is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, with additional support from other organizations and private contributors including Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates. The research papers relating to the Sorcha project include:
Forbes
8 hours ago
- Forbes
How To Love Your (Agentic) Database Administrator
An Internet Geek Developers love meritocracy. Software engineering professionals don't judge individuals by the way they look, the way they dress and whether or not they have a purple-green hair dye rinse on their head (spoiler alert, it's actually considered a good thing)... and they never have. They tend to classify their counterparts and contemporaries on the basis of their skillset, their ability to show technical competency and their enthusiasm for the combined arts of coding and data science. If there's one chink in that argument, it's a possible hierachy between the developer community and the operations team. While the developers get to build, program and create, the Ops team are assigned the responsibility to underpin, maintain and manage. Some developers occasionally regard the sysadmins, database administrators and testing team as less skilled; the rise of DevOps has sought to unite these two streams and platform engineering is also aiming to create and reinforce bonds, but fractures inevitably exist. Could a new wave of agentic AI services in the data management space actually help elevate the status of this essential function and, just maybe, actually help elevate the status of this role to the tier that it deserves? Lithuania-based tech writer Jastra Kranjec says we're on the cusp. Citing the multiplicity of management consultancy reports in this space that suggest AI agents are about to really start helping us work (Capgemini's Top Tech Trends of 2025 survey points to their use to boost efficiency and develop automation), Kranjec says that AI agents have now 'evolved from experimental tools' into mainstream business solutions. 'Last year, even major enterprises like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and PwC began integrating them into their operations, proving them as one of the top AI trends. Moreover, this is just the beginning of AI agents` growth, with market projections showing a surging adoption in the years ahead. Last year, the AI agent industry was valued at around $5.1 billion. This figure is projected to soar by a whopping 821%, reaching $47 billion by 2030,' wrote Kranjec. While such massive percentage projections make for dizzying reading, perhaps we should centralize our focus on the actual jobs agentic AI can now take on. In the data management and manipulation space, that brings us back to the poor database administrator, could the AI DBA be about to become the real hero? Stewart Bond sees a role for this exact job function. In his role as VP of data intelligence and integration software at technology analyst house IDC, he projects that AI can now take on a central role in data orchestration and administration. 'The rise of agentic AI orchestration is expected to accelerate, and companies need to start preparing now,' said Bond. 'To unlock agentic AI's full potential, companies should seek solutions that unify disparate data types, including structured, unstructured, real-time and historical information, in a single environment. This allows AI to derive richer insights and drive more impactful outcomes.' Bond makes his comments in order to contextualize new services stemming from data streaming company Confluent. The organization has now come forward with new Confluent Cloud capabilities that are said to make it easier to process and secure data for faster insights and decision-making. Looking at exactly which products and tools are now on offer, snapshot queries is a new service in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink designed to bring together real-time and historic data processing to make AI agents and analytics smarter. Confluent Cloud network routing works in concert with this technology to simplify private networking for Apache Flink (an open source data stream processing framework for running computations in 'bounded' - those with a defined start and end - and unbounded data stream environments) and this all sits alongside IP filtering to adds access controls, thereby securing data for agentic AI and analytics. 'Agentic AI is moving from hype to enterprise adoption as organizations look to gain a competitive edge and win in today's market,' said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent. 'But without high-quality data, even the most advanced systems can't deliver real value. The new Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink features make it possible to blend real-time and batch data so that enterprises can trust their agentic AI to drive real change.' Clowes agrees with the proposition that Confluent didn't necessarily build this technology to enable, create or innovate the true arrival of the agentic DBA, but he concurs, if the continued extension of the company's platform makes this 'job position' a reality, then it will surely serve IT stacks in every industry for the better. We can certainly suggest that agentic AI is driving widespread change in business operations from the DBA, right upwards through the developer function to the application and user interface. 'However, for AI data agents to make the right decisions, they need historical context about what happened in the past and insight into what's happening right now. For example, for fraud detection, banks need real-time data to react in the moment and historical data to see if a transaction fits a customer's usual patterns. Hospitals need real-time vitals alongside patient medical history to make safe, informed treatment decisions. But to leverage both past and present data, teams often have to use separate tools and develop manual workarounds, resulting in time-consuming work and broken workflows. Additionally, it's important to secure the data that's used for analytics and agentic AI; this ensures trustworthy results and prevents sensitive data from being accessed,' explains Confluent, in a technical product statement. To address these challenges, the company says that snapshot queries in Confluent Cloud let teams unify historical and streaming data with a single product and language, enabling consistent, intelligent experiences for both analytics and agentic AI. With the company's Tableflow service integration, teams can gain context from past data. Snapshot queries allow teams to explore, test, and analyze data without spinning up new workloads. This makes it easier to supply agents with context from historic and real-time data or conduct an audit to understand key trends and patterns. 'The rise of the Agentic DBA is already happening… and there are some very 'human' reasons behind it. Dealing with disruptions like anomalies, outages, or performance optimizations is distracting (to say the least) for DBAs and data infrastructure teams,' enthused Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder & CEO of cloud-native open source database company Yugabyte. 'DBA agents are trained to respond and optimize automatically, allowing human workers to focus on more strategic business value tasks.' Ranganathan says that agentic DBAs are capable of anything from performing query execution patterns to analyzing resource trends to mentoring cloud cluster health, which means all these tasks can now be dealt with automatically. This allows DBAs to avoid 'alert fatigue' and learn from previously taken actions when their workload permits. 'The agentic DBA is a natural extension of modern databases, such as distributed SQL databases. The point of a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database is to deliver cloud-native apps that scale effortlessly, are never offline and automate tasks like backups behind the scenes. The rise of the agentic DBA, which fine-tunes performance on the fly, will need to be part of any cloud-native distributed database going forward,' stated Yugabyte's Ranganathan. There are many technologies in this space now coming forward. If you're lucky enough to get invited to an Oracle welcome keynote on a Sunday night at its tech events, this is the kind of technology that the company talks about volubly. With so many database functions now ripe for moving to automation such as patching, maintenance checks, upgrades and perhaps also data normalization and deduplicatoin, it's no surprise to hear the database giant talk about database automation. Does IBM make something in this area too? Usually, is the safe answer. May this year saw the company announce its answer to database automation challenges in the form of Db2 Intelligence Center, an AI-powered database management platform designed specifically for Db2 database administrators and IT professionals managing databases. 'We've spent years talking to Db2 database administrators, understanding their pain points, frustrations and the complexity of their workflows. The feedback we have captured is loud and clear: DBAs are tired of fragmented tools that don't integrate with each other. They're tired of the endless libraries of scripts where each DBA maintains his or her own variations and they're tired of constantly reacting to problems and manually troubleshooting, as opposed to being proactive in their database management approach,' said Ani Joshi, senior product manager for Db2, IBM data & AI. Db2 Intelligence Center is a unified, intelligent management console purpose-built for Db2 administrators. It combines advanced monitoring, AI-powered troubleshooting and query optimization into an integrated service that simplifies and accelerates many aspects of Db2 management. With these (arguably) not insignificant automations now coming to the fore, some may ask whether we will have succeeded in making the role of the human database administrator redundant. The answer to that question is, obviously, of course no, don't be silly. What we're seeing here are the mechanical repetitively rote tasks that a DBA has to undertake, now taken out of their workflow to some degree (in some cases totally) and so creating a new DBA role that can start to work more closely with the developer team, provide more business-centric value through increased proximity to commercial teams while also now working to innovate and create new data services. If all that doesn't make you love your DBA just that little bit more, then you just might need a hug.
