There has long been a quest to understand how jets are launched from supermassive black holes
The enigmatic forces at work in and around a black hole, which are unseen to the naked eye but have the potential to tear apart the planets around it, have long piqued the attention of astronomers interested in unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos.
For a long time, scientists have pondered the question of what causes the jets emitted by blazars to grow so bright, as well as the behaviour of the particles inside those jets. About a million light-years in all directions, these jets from this blazar may be seen.
Scientists have now figured out why blazars, which are supermassive black holes that eat the material in a disc that around them, shoot such enormous and dazzling jets of high-energy particles into deep space.
Researchers have provided an explanation for the brightening of these jets using data from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) observatory. Electrons, which are very small subatomic particles, were discovered to be powered by the outwardly propagating shock waves from the black hole.
The blazar was discovered in the centre of Markarian 501, a huge elliptical galaxy that is roughly 460 million light-years from Earth and points in the direction of the constellation Hercules. It takes light one year to traverse the 5.9 trillion miles that make up a light year (9.5 trillion km).
Supermassive black holes fueling themselves on gas and other material in the centres of galaxies power blazars, a subgroup of quasars that emits two jets of particles in opposite directions. One of a blazar's two jets will be pointing squarely towards Earth.
Nasa and the Italian Space Agency worked together to launch the Earth-orbiting IXPE satellite, which collects a new kind of information never previously available from space. This new information measures the polarisation of X-ray light, which means that the electric field of the light waves that compose X-rays may be detected by the IXPE instrument.
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Scientists discovered X-ray emission and high velocities as a result of charged particles in the jet being struck by a shock wave that travels outward inside the stream. As an object travels faster than the speed of sound through a medium, such as air (like a supersonic plane does when it.
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 "Photo: NASA")
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