A massive jet of matter spewing out of a black hole 12 million light-years away is hitting something in space, but astronomers aren’t exactly sure what.
This structure appeared in the latest deep X-ray image taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory—in fact, the deepest X-ray image ever taken of a galaxy, called Centaurus A. The unknown obstruction, called the -C4, is to emit more X-rays. The team’s latest discoveries around Centaurus A and its surprising obstacles are published in the The Astrophysical Journal.
Black holes are regions of space-time with such strong gravity that light cannot escape beyond a point called the event horizon. Black holes can be anywhere between several times the mass of the Sun (barring the existence of primordial black holes) to many millions of the mass of the Sun.
But black holes have other extreme physics at work; objects sometimes emit jets of particles that travel at nearly the speed of light. These jets can cause starbursts—literally, they can cause stars to explode—and they can be incredibly large; in September, a team of astronomers discovered black hole jets 140 times the diameter of the Milky Way.
C4 has V-shaped arms, visible in the Chandra image (shown below; the top image is a wide-field image that does not show C4). The V shape that appears to be caused by a jet from a black hole hitting an object.
Although the V-shaped arms from C4 appear very small—especially compared to the massive jet on the other side of the black hole—one spans 700 light-years. For reference, and as noted in the Chandra X-ray Observatory release, the black hole’s plane is 30,000 light-years across, while the nearest star to the Sun is four light-years away. All this is a reminder that the universe is gargantuan.
This is not the first time that a black hole jet has hit something—in fact, astronomers have previously seen Jet Centaurus A hit objects, perhaps stars or gas clouds. But the V-shape of the C4 is unusual, and may be related to the type of object the aircraft hits or the way the aircraft collides with the object.
Black hole jets are some of the brightest interstellar objects around and clearly have many tricks up their sleeves. While we may not know what C4 is anytime soon, rest assured that researchers are out there.
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