When NASA scientists probed and charted a far away galaxy, they were surprised to discover a familiar shape lurking 500 million light-years from Earth — Darth Vader's TIE fighter spaceship from the Star Wars franchise.
For five years, the team used radio waves to reach across space to the Cassiopeia constellation and study a faint source of gamma rays, and in a recent study they published their new findings on the active galaxy, which is known as TXS 0128.
"We zoomed in a million times closer on the galaxy using the Very Long Baseline Array's radio antennas and charted its shape over time," Matthew Lister, a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University, said.
"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."
TXS 0128 is anchored to a supermassive black hole with about a billion times the mass of the Sun.
But because the signals it emits are about 100,000 times weaker than most of the 3,000 active galaxies detected, scientists needed years of data to properly analyse it.
The shape of the galaxy — or at least the way it appears from Earth — depends on the radio frequency used to perceive it.
"At 2.3 gigahertz (GHz), about 21 times greater than the maximum broadcast frequency of FM radio, it looks like an amorphous blob," NASA said.
"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."
During their research, scientists also revealed the galaxy has a span of 35 light-years, and tilts about 50 degrees out of the line of sight from Earth.
"This angle … may explain why the galaxy is so dim in gamma rays," NASA said.
But it has also been critical to helping uncover what has been going on around TXS 0128.
"The real-world universe is three-dimensional, but when we look out into space, we usually only see two dimensions," Daniel Homan, a co-author and professor of astronomy at Denison University, said.
"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."
