'Time-traveling assassin' 13 billion years ago kills an entire galaxy

The ALMA telescope has just captured a terrifying image from nearly 13 billion years ago, in which filaments of deadly gas are "massacred" a galaxy .

The object spewing out the huge, high-speed filaments of gas is a quasar — ​​a monster black hole that is extremely bright as it devours matter — called J2054-0005. The 'victim' galaxy has lost the ability to form stars due to the devastating attack.

Quasar J2054-0005 shines brightly in the early universe and is "massacred" a galaxy - (Image: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).

These molecular gas streams are made of oxygen bonded to hydrogen, which is the main fuel for star formation, according to a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal .

However, when the black hole cluster shoots too quickly into the galaxy, the developing stars can become "overfed ." That drastically reduces the ability to form stars in the region where the quasar is located.

According to Live Science, the chilling moment was captured by the ALMA telescope, a powerful giant radio observation network located in Chile.

With its "huge" vision, ALMA looked straight at the world just 900 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe. The Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago.

Since light takes a time to travel relative to its distance, the catastrophic event depicted here is an image of 13 billion years ago, at a place that was once that many light years away from Earth.

In reality, if galaxies or black holes still exist, they have been pushed far away by the expansion of the universe. It is even more likely that both have long since disappeared.

However, thanks to the delay in the recorded images, ALMA accidentally let humanity see intact what happened in the early universe nearly 13 billion years ago.

The new ALMA finding may partly explain some recent observations that the early universe contained a number of faint, ghostly galaxies . They may have been bombarded by wild quasars from the universe 13 billion years ago, leading to poor star formation.

In addition to expelling gas with powerful beams of light, quasars can also hurl nearby matter away at nearly the speed of light thanks to their tremendous rotational speed.

With all the confirmed phenomena related to quasar J2054-0005, the research team led by Associate Professor Dragan Salak from Hokkaido University (Japan) hopes that astronomers will find more such quasars in the future, using increasingly modern tools.

They will help to better understand the glowing hearts of the first galaxies in the universe, which were absurdly large monster black holes that shook long-standing astronomical theories.