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A massive jet of material from a black hole 12 million light-years away is hitting space, but astronomers don’t know exactly what.
The structure appeared in an ultra-deep X-ray image taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is actually the deepest X-ray image ever taken of a galaxy called C4. and the latest discoveries of the astronomical team about the unexpected obstacle were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Black holes are regions of space-time whose gravity is so intense that light cannot escape beyond a point called the event horizon. Black holes can be anywhere in between several times the mass of our Sun (forbidding existence primordial black holes) to many billions of times the mass of the sun.
But black holes have other extreme physics: objects sometimes emit jets of particles that travel at nearly the speed of light catalyze starbursts— literally, they can blow up stars, and they can also be staggeringly large. In September, a group of astronomers discovered black hole jets 140 times longer than the width of the Milky Way.
C4 has V-shaped arms, visible in the Chandra image (shown below: the top image is a wide-field shot that does not show C4.) The apparent V-shape is caused by the jet of the black hole hitting the object :
Although the V-shaped wings emanating from C4 appear quite small, especially compared to the massive jets on the other side of the black hole, they each stretch 700 light years long. is a light guide, and the nearest star to the Sun is four light years away is that the universe is vast.
This is not the first time that a jet from a black hole collides with something. in fact, astronomers have previously seen Centaurus A impacting objects, perhaps stars or gas clouds.However, the V shape of C4 is irregular and may be related to the object the jet is impacting or the object the jet is interacting with.
Black hole jets are one of them the brightest astrophysical phenomena around and clearly have more tricks up their sleeves.While we may not know what C4 is anytime soon, rest assured that researchers are on the case.
