The sky is full of weird X-shaped galaxies

Spied through a normal telescope, the galaxy PKS 2014−55 is an unremarkable smudge of bright light. But look again in radio wavelengths, and you'll see that the galaxy is hiding a gargantuan, glowing treasure at its center — and X marks the spot.

PKS 2014−55 is an X-shaped radio galaxy (XRG), an unusual type of galaxy that looks like an enormous X in the night sky when imaged in radio wavelengths. The long arms of the X — each one about 100 times longer than the Milky Way — are actually a blazing-fast soup of particles and magnetic fields, blasted out of the galaxy's central black hole and traveling for millions of light-years into space, far beyond the galaxy's edge.

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(Image: NRAO/AUI/NSF; SARAO; DES)

The 'double boomerang' of an x-shaped radio galaxy. These big blue jets are about 100 times longer than the entire Milky Way.

Source / Image Courtesy

Big jets of radio energy are common in galaxies with hungry black holes at their centers (even the Milky Way has two "bubbles" of radio energy around its gut).

Animation of a barred galaxy like the Milky Way showing the presence of an X-shaped bulge.

The X-shape extends to about one half of the bar radius.

It is directly visible when the bar is seen from the side, but when the viewer is close to the long axis of the bar it cannot be seen directly and its presence can only be inferred from the distribution of brightnesses of stars along a given direction.