When astronomers use radio telescopes to gaze into the night sky, they typically see elliptical-shaped galaxies, with twin jets blasting from either side of their central supermassive black hole. But every once in a while — less than 10% of the time — astronomers might spot something special and rare: An X-shaped radio galaxy, with four jets extending far into space.
Although these mysterious X-shaped radio galaxies have confounded astrophysicists for two decades, a new Northwestern University study sheds new insight into how they form — and its surprisingly simple. The study also found that X-shaped radio galaxies might be more common than previously thought.
Using new simulations, the Northwestern astrophysicists implemented simple conditions to model the feeding of a supermassive black hole and the organic formation of its jets and accretion disk. When the researchers ran the simulation, the simple conditions organically and unexpectedly led to the formation of an X-shaped radio galaxy.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that the galaxy’s characteristic X-shape resulted from the interaction between the jets and the gas falling into the black hole. Early in the simulation, the infalling gas deflected the newly formed jets, which turned on and off, erratically wobbled and inflated pairs of cavities in different directions to resemble an X-shape. Eventually, however, the jets became strong enough to push through the gas. At this point, the jets stabilized, stopped wobbling and propagated along one axis.
Credit: Aretaios Lalakos