Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, researchers believe they have found an explanation for how this unusual structure formed. Because of its resemblance to a musical symbol called the treble clef, a strange formation of radio waves in space has caught the attention of astronomers.
The formation, named the “Treble Clef” because of its shape, is likely the result of an outburst from a supermassive black hole followed by the collision of two galaxy clusters, according to NASA .
The findings were led by Andrea Botteon of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). The research paper was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Germany’s eROSITA X-ray telescope detected widespread, extremely hot gas at the location of the formation. This showed that the Treble Clef is associated with a galaxy cluster. To study the collision, researchers used a special method to examine the shape of the cluster’s hot gas. Most of the gas had a roughly oval shape. They removed this symmetrical shape from the original X-ray image to highlight other features.
