Scientists using radio telescopes to look deep into space have tuned into a frequency that reveals a shape that should be familiar and maybe a touch worrying to sci-fi fans.
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.Due to the weakness of detectable signals from the TIE fighter galaxy, scientists needed years of data for their analysis
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"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.
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 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."
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