Have you ever had an X-ray taken of your bones? Well, so has the Milky Way. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory routinely images our home galaxy, and a current scan captured something that may be familiar to a few of you: a fractured “bone.”

The bone-like structure in the image above was imaged utilizing radio information from MeerKAT radio selection in South Africa and the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array in New Mexico– you’ll see a minor fracture in the structure a little bit more than a 3rd of the method down.

Overlaying Chandra’s X-ray information (displayed in brilliant blue) with the radio information exposes the most likely reason for the fracture to be an effect from a pulsar, a quickly spinning neutron star that sends pulses of radiation at routine periods. Obviously, the ghostly structure isn’t a genuine bone, however rather a stellar center filament, among lots of enormous structures produced by radio waves threaded along electromagnetic fields at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The specific cosmic “bone” revealed here is G359.13142-0.20005 (G359.13 for brief, or often described as the Snake), and it’s one of the brightest and longest stellar center filaments we’ve identified. Found some 26,000 light-years from Earth, it’s about 230 light-years long.

Researchers presume that the pulsar knocked into G359.13 at a shocking speed in between one million and 2 million miles per hour (1.6 million to 3.2 million km per hour).

Related: Did astronomers simply find the tiniest galaxy in deep space?

Considered that neutron stars are incredibly thick– in truth, they’re the densest recognized stars in deep space– it’s not a surprise that a high-speed crash quickly misshaped the filament’s electromagnetic field, producing the fracture.