James' World 2

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Photo illustration: Inc.; Art: Getty Images

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Galaxies are spooky places.

Space itself is scary enough—dark, vast, cold, and empty—but galaxies have all manner of terrifying beasts lurking inside. Most of these astrophysical monsters are stars with various behavioral issues, such as explosive supernovae or ridiculously powerful (and tempestuous) magnetars. Getting too close to one of these stellar tantrums guarantees a very bad time.

On top of that, galaxies themselves can be terrifying. In a recent The Universe column, I wrote about particularly nasty cosmic nightmares called active galaxies. You see, all big galaxies have a supermassive black hole haunting their heart, and some of these black holes have billions of times the mass of the sun. If matter is falling into one of these black holes at a high rate, that infalling material heats up to frightening temperatures and blasts out high-energy radiation. This also drives intense winds of subatomic particles that flow away at high speed to wreak havoc around the galactic core. That’s all bad enough, but the spin of the black hole can also launch twin beams of matter called jets that can scream across space like death rays, cooking everything in their path for many thousands of light-years.

This doesn’t sound like a clement environment! After the article was published, I received quite a few inquiries from readers asking some unsettling questions: How dangerous is it to live in an active galaxy—and is the Milky Way one?

As usual, the answer is: it depends. The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, called Sgr A*, seems to be pretty sedate at present, but we don’t know just how active our galaxy was in its youth. We can see echoes of previous events around the galactic center, however, stretching away from the Milky Way’s heart are two immense bubbles of hot gas that are softly glowing with gamma rays. It’s unclear if these bubbles, called Fermi Bubbles, are blown by some wind of material from Sgr A* after a snack or if a burst of star formation created enough high-mass stars to expel winds that expand the gas.

And as for the more fundamental question of active galaxy hazards, this hasn’t been very well studied, but I did find a couple of papers that tackled it under limited circumstances. The results, not too surprisingly, show that the two most important factors are how powerful the active galaxy is and how far you are from it.

In extreme cases, even being outside the active galaxy will not keep you safe. A prime example of this is the galaxy pair 3C321, where a jet from one of the galaxies is slamming into the other about 20,000 light-years away. Being in the path of all that high-energy radiation must be rough, but the impact of the jet is also causing clouds of gas in the second galaxy to collapse, which triggers scads of star formation. That, in turn, means the creation of many high-mass stars, which explode as supernovae in just a few million years.

Opinions vary on how close a planet can be to an exploding star and survive, but a few hundred light-years is a conservative estimate. On a galactic scale, that’s very close, so on average, it’s unlikely to afflict any particular world. Then again, on galactic scales, a few million years is an instant, so all those jet-sparked supernovae would be detonating almost simultaneously—which can’t be good for any worlds in the general vicinity. I’d advise you stay away from jets.

What about the other effects? The wind of subatomic particles is a problem—two problems, really. One is that if the wind strikes a planet such as Earth, it can deposit energy in the atmosphere, heating it up. This causes the air to expand, making it more prone to be lost to space. The other is that when those particles hit the atmosphere, they can trigger a few different kinds of chemical reactions, including the creation of nitrogen oxides, major components of smog. This has several effects, but one of the most deleterious is that smog destroys ozone, a molecule composed of three oxygen atoms. Ozone absorbs energetic ultraviolet light from the host star that can otherwise reach the surface and be harmful to life.

In a paper published earlier this year in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers modeled these two effects from an active galaxy. The researchers first assumed the galaxy had a black hole similar to our Milky Way’s Sgr A*, with a mass of four million suns. They then calculated the energy from the wind, finding that it could erode the atmosphere of an Earth-like world as far out as 1,300 light-years—or just deplete the planet’s ozone if it was within about 3,000 light-years. These might seem like worrisomely large distances, but the Milky Way is 60,000 light-years in radius, and our solar system is about 26,000 light-years out from the center, so we’re safe from nasty winds.

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Where Things Stand

• Food stamps: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps during the federal shutdown. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, aids roughly 42 million people and was set to run out of funds on Saturday without intervention. The judge ordered distribution of funds “as soon as possible.” Read more ›

• Boat strikes: Mexico said it had not found any survivors from U.S. military strikes on Monday off the Central and South American coasts that killed 14 people, days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that one person had survived the strikes. U.S. officials said the boats were smuggling drugs, and the Pentagon said that had it notified a nearby Mexican military boat and that Mexican officials had assumed responsibility for the rescue. Read more ›

• Air travel: Insufficient staffing at air traffic control facilities caused a second day of widespread delays, as several large airports reported service interruptions. The controllers’ union released a statement on Friday that effectively endorsed congressional Republicans’ approach to ending the shutdown.

A judge permanently bars Trump from requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

A federal judge in Washington permanently barred the Trump administration on Friday from requiring proof of citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a change dictated in an executive order President Trump signed in March.

The ruling definitively halted the effort to compel the Elections Assistance Commission, an independent body, to adopt nationwide changes to voting procedures at a time when the president has also called for requiring voter identification in elections and ending mail-in voting. For months, voting rights groups have warned that those changes, in tandem with the deployment of the national guard to the streets of Democratic-led cities, resembled steps of a voter-suppression strategy.

What is happening with SNAP benefits during the shutdown?

A federal judge told the Trump administration on Friday to continue funding for food stamps during the government shutdown, a legal victory for local officials and nonprofits that sought to spare roughly 42 million Americans from losing the benefits in a matter of days.

But it is unclear if or when food stamps will soon reach those who rely on them to purchase groceries. Here’s what we know about the status of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The White House put new limits on reporters’ access to the press secretary’s office.

The Trump administration on Friday took another step to micromanage the news-gathering activities of journalists who work from the White House, the latest move in a gradual crackdown that has broken with decades of precedent.

For generations, White House reporters have been allowed to roam freely from the press briefing room into a warren of offices in the West Wing, known as “Upper Press,” that houses the press secretary and other senior press aides. Journalists could ask impromptu questions of administration officials and, during breaking news, quickly obtain information for their audiences.

As pain from the shutdown grows, Trump attends to other matters.

American families are worried about losing food stamp benefits. Hundreds of thousands of federal government workers have no idea when they will next be paid. Several airports have been experiencing delays because of staffing shortages.

The pain of the government shutdown is growing more acute as it grinds toward the five-week mark, with Congress showing little movement toward a resolution. But President Trump has been attending to other matters.

Immigration agents clash with Chicago-area residents on Halloween.

Federal immigration agents fanned out across Chicago and its North Shore suburbs on Halloween, chasing suspects through front yards, driving S.U.V.s onto sidewalks, and using chemical agents during confrontations with furious residents.

Several people, including at least one woman who said that she was a U.S. citizen, were arrested after appearing to interfere with immigration operations. In Evanston, a suburb north of Chicago, Border Patrol agents detained at least one additional person after a car rear-ended the agents’ vehicle on Friday, according to the Evanston police.

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President Trump speaking to reporters as he arrived in Palm Beach, Fla., on Friday.Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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