Where it is: 2 billion light-years from Earth
The universe is full of structures that remind us of Earthly objects, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, a "cosmic hamburger," and the famous Crab Nebula. Now, one more has been added to the list: a radio galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow.
Radio galaxies are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes that launch powerful jets of charged particles in opposite directions. As these high-speed jets crash into the surrounding medium, they form huge lobes of magnetized plasma that can stretch for thousands to millions of light-years. Inside both the jets and the lobes, electrons spiral around magnetic-field lines and emit radiation that is detected at radio wavelengths.
RAD-BAARG was first spotted by citizen scientist Pranim Limbo while inspecting ultrasensitive radio images from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey. Limbo made the discovery through India's RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, a citizen-science research initiative in India, in collaboration with an international team of researchers.
Researchers think the strange shape may have been influenced by the galaxy's environment. RAD-BAARG appears to be falling toward a nearby cluster of galaxies, plunging through the intracluster medium, the hot, thin gas that fills the space between galaxies, the researchers explained in a paper published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
When a galaxy moves through this gas faster than the speed of sound within it, it creates a shock front, similar to how a fighter jet generates a sonic boom. This compressed wall of gas piles up ahead of the galaxy as the gas falls inward.
According to the study, RAD-BAARG has a length of about 2.3 million light-years. That places it in the category of "Giant Radio Galaxies," which are some of the largest standalone single structures in the universe.
See more space photos of the week:
'Human minds should not go through this'
The Artemis II crew recalls the unreal moment when Earth disappeared
First-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal a 163,000-light-year stream of stars emanating from a nearby galaxy.
A spectacular James Webb telescope image reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula.
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