Scintillating Discovery: These Distant 'Baby' Black Holes Seem to be Misbehaving
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Radio images of the sky have revealed hundreds of "baby" and supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, with the galaxies' light bouncing around in unexpected ways.
[...] Astronomers have long questioned why some radio galaxies host enormous lobes, while others remain small and confined. Two theories exist. One is that the jets are held back by dense material around the black hole, often referred to as frustrated lobes.
[...] The second theory to explain smaller lobes is the jets are young and have not yet extended to great distances.
[...] From the data, baby radio galaxies appear blue, which means they're brighter at higher radio frequencies. Meanwhile the old and dying radio galaxies appear red and are brighter in the lower radio frequencies.
We identified 554 baby radio galaxies. When we looked at identical data taken a year later, we were surprised to see 123 of these were bouncing around in their brightness, appearing to flicker. This left us with a puzzle.
Something more than one light year in size can't vary so much in brightness over less than one year without breaking the laws of physics. So, either our galaxies were far smaller than expected, or something else was happening.
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