Monday, 31 July 2023 – 09:01 WIB
LIVE Techno – A NASA (Aviation and Space Agency) mission has observed a supermassive black hole directing its jet directly at Earth. However, don’t panic just yet. As frightening as this cosmic event may seem, it lies at a very safe distance of about 400 million light years.
Active supermassive black holes are surrounded by a swirling disk of matter, called an accretion disk, which gradually feeds them over time.
Some of the material they don’t swallow is then funneled to the poles, where they are detonated at near-light or relativistic speeds, according to the Live Science website, Monday, July 31, 2023.
This creates very energetic and very bright electromagnetic radiation. In some cases, such as NASA’s latest model, the jet is pointed directly at Earth. The event is known as a blazar.
The blazar, named Markarian 421, is located in the constellation Ursa Major, observed with NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which launched in December 2021.
IXPE observes a property of the magnetic field called polarization, which refers to the orientation of the field. The polarization of the jets detonated by Markarian 421 revealed a surprise to astronomers, showing that the part of the jet where particles are accelerated is also home to a magnetic field with a helical structure.
Blazar jets can traverse space for millions of light years. But the mechanisms that launch them are not well understood. However, these new discoveries surrounding the Markarian 421 jet may shed some light on this extreme cosmic phenomenon.
2023-07-31 02:01:00
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