NASA spots mysterious V-shaped scar stretching 700 light-years across space

Picture a scar roughly 700 light-years long, carved into the X-ray sky by something nobody can identify. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a mark where a giant black hole's powerful jet struck an unidentified object in its path. It's a black hole jet, moving at close to light speed, crashing into the unknown.

Centaurus A is the galaxy that is 12 million light-years away from Earth. It has been fascinating to scientists for a long time due to the existence of the supermassive black hole inside of it. 

This black hole creates a stream of energetic particles thanks to the strong magnetic fields and gravity surrounding it. Scientists have analysed this jet before.

This source was named C4, and it appears near the jet. C4 was discovered during the deepest X-ray image obtained by Chandra of the galaxy. 

David Bogensberger from the University of Michigan led the team that made the discovery, which included scientists from the University of Maryland, Penn State, the University of Toulouse, and the Israel Institute of Technology. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.

What Could the Black Hole Jet Be Hitting?

The best guesses are a massive star or a binary star pair. The X-rays could come from jet particles colliding with the gas in a wind blowing away from the star. That wind is a stream of particles flowing out into space.

At 12 million light-years, even Chandra can't resolve what the object really is.

Other obstacles in the jet's path produce elliptical blobs of X-rays, but C4 shows a V. The arms are at least about 700 light-years long. The lower arm trails almost parallel to the jet. The other skews away from it, and nobody has an explanation.

The difference could depend on the type of object being struck or on how directly the jet hits it. Chandra is the only X-ray observatory able to see the feature.