Death Star, The Deadly Galaxy and the real star wars

Just surfing around, I found Space.com story, "Galaxy Blasts Neighbor with Deadly Jet."

For the first time astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy.

The "death star galaxy," as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in the wake of its destructive beam.

...

"The deadly galaxy — the largest of two in a system known as 3C321 — is aiming the high-energy jet from its center at a smaller galaxy 20,000 light-years away from it, or roughly the distance from Earth to the Milky Way's core. Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth."

I surfed around more trying to figure out why would black holes shooting stuff out? Moments later I was reading Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog:

[Black holes] do something that surprises most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees.

Photo credit:Chandra
Phil's blog is now on my regular reading list. He describes 3C321 as well as explains the Chandra photo above:

This object is actually two galaxies. Both have active black holes in their cores, but one of the two is creating these death ray beams… and the other galaxy is in the way.

The picture from Chandra shows this drama unfolding. The beams are coming from the lower left, where the more active galaxy sits. The orange and red colors (from Hubble) represent optical and ultraviolet light emitted by the galaxy. This generally indicates regions where stars are being born; it appears as if the beams from the black hole are compressing gas in the galaxy, collapsing it, and aiding it in forming stars.

Very fascinating stuff indeed.

Also checkout:
YourSky: Online Map of your sky
Heavens Above: Understand the Sky you see