Magnetic support of the optical emission line filaments in NGC 1275

The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275, at the centre of the Perseus cluster, is surrounded by a well-known giant nebulosity of emission-line filaments1,2, which are plausibly about>108 yr old3. The filaments are dragged out from the centre of the galaxy by the radio bubbles rising buoyantly in the hot intracluster gas4 before later falling back. They act as dramatic markers of the feedback process by which energy is transferred from the central massive black hole to the surrounding gas. The mechanism by which the filaments are stabilized against tidal shear and dissipation into the surrounding 4×107K gas has been unclear. Here we report new observations that resolve thread-like structures in the filaments. Some threads extend over 6 kpc, yet are only 70 pc wide. We conclude that magnetic fields in the threads, in pressure balance with the surrounding gas, stabilize the filaments, so allowing a large mass of cold gas to accumulate and delay star formation. The images presented here (Figs. 1—4) were taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) using three filters; F625W in the red contains the Hα line, F550M is mostly continuum and F435W in the blue which highlights young stars. In Fig. 2 we