Most galaxies are built around giant black holes. While many of these objects are relatively benign, like the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, some are violent: They consume large amounts of surrounding material and release a huge light beam of high-energy particles far into space.
Using data from the orbiting observatory’s X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), researchers Wednesday provided an explanation for how these jets are made so bright: Subatomic particles called electrons are energized by shock waves traveling at speeds supersonic jets away from the hole. .Black. .
Researchers have studied a strange object called Blazar at the center of a large elliptical galaxy called Markarian 501 that lies about 460 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Hercules. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
Blazars are part of objects called quasars that are powered by supermassive black holes that feed on gas and other material at the centers of galaxies and send two streams of particles out into space in opposite directions. The blazars are oriented so that one of their two jets from our vantage point on Earth is heading straight at us.
“Blazars are the most consistently luminous objects in the visible universe. They are the most active. They have the largest and most dangerous black holes. Everything that was happening around them was absolutely fantastic,” said astronomer Yannis Liodakis of the Finnish Astronomy Center with ESO, lead author of the research published in the journal. alam.
Scientists have long tried to understand how the glow of fire gets so bright and the behavior of the particles inside it. The jets from this blazar travel a distance of about a million light-years.
Launched last December as a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, IXPE measures the luminosity and polarization – a property of light involving the orientation of electromagnetic waves – of X-ray light from a cosmic source. Various phenomena, such as shock waves or turbulence, provide polarizing “signals”.
The researchers found evidence that particles inside the craft become excited when hit by a shock wave that spreads outward in the stream and emits X-rays as it accelerates. Shock waves occur when something moves faster than the speed of sound through a medium such as air – such as a supersonic jet does when it passes through the earth’s atmosphere – or an area of particles and magnetic fields called plasma, such as in this case.
“The light we see from airplanes comes from electrons,” said Boston University astrophysicist and study co-author Alan Marcher. “X-rays of the kind we observed in Markarian 501 can only come from very high-energy electrons.”
The driving force behind this drama is a black hole, an incredibly dense object with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. The supermassive black hole at the center of Markarian 501 is about a billion times the mass of our sun. It’s about 200 times the size of a block bow *The supermassive black hole of the Milky Way.
“Black holes are a unique laboratory for studying basic physics under extreme conditions that we cannot replicate on Earth,” said Liudakis.
However, before we can use it in this way, we need to understand all the physical processes that take place. Over the years, we’ve observed high-energy light from these sources and have several theories about how light-emitting particles energize them. “IXPE’s X-ray polarization capabilities allowed us to directly test our theory for the first time,” said Liudakis.
