A stunning new discovery has revealed a massive spiral galaxy, located nearly 1 billion light-years away, that is doing something scientists didn’t think was possible—and it could hint at a scary future for our own Milky Way galaxy.
An international team of astronomers led by CHRIST University in Bangalore studied a galaxy called 2MASX J23453268−0449256, which is about three times larger than the Milky Way.
Surprisingly, it has a supermassive black hole billions of times the mass of our Sun, shooting out enormous radio jets that stretch 6 million light-years across.
These jets are made up of powerful cosmic rays, gamma rays, and X-rays.
Normally, such jets are only seen in elliptical galaxies, not spiral galaxies like ours. That’s why this galaxy is such a shocking find—it breaks the rules of what scientists believed about how galaxies grow and change.
What’s even more interesting is that, despite the black hole’s violent activity, this galaxy still has a peaceful spiral shape with clear arms and a bright core. Usually, such energy would rip a spiral galaxy apart. But this one has survived and even thrived.
The research team used data from powerful telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, and others to study this strange galaxy. They also found that it is surrounded by a halo of hot, X-ray-emitting gas, which the black hole keeps from cooling down and forming new stars.
This discovery raises big questions: Could our Milky Way galaxy do the same thing one day?
Right now, the Milky Way’s central black hole—called Sagittarius A*—is quiet. It weighs about 4 million times the Sun’s mass and isn’t doing much. But if it suddenly swallowed a gas cloud, a star, or even a small galaxy, it could wake up and start releasing huge jets like the ones seen in this distant galaxy. These events, called Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs), have happened in other galaxies but not yet in ours.
If such a jet were pointed at Earth, it could be very dangerous. It might damage the ozone layer, increase harmful radiation, or even cause a mass extinction.
Another fascinating part of the discovery is that the distant galaxy contains 10 times more dark matter than the Milky Way. This may help explain how it stays stable despite the black hole’s activity.
Scientists say this galaxy could give us important clues about how galaxies evolve, how black holes grow, and even how life survives in the universe.
As one researcher put it: “This shows that the universe still holds surprises beyond our imagination.”
