An invisible stream of superfast plasma is heading straight for Earth, and scientists are thrilled.
The reason why is that these jets offer the first evidence of a microblazar. This is a tiny version of a blazar—an active galactic nucleus that contains a supermassive black hole that throws out high-speed jets of plasma. Scientists have long believed small versions of blazars exist in our own galaxy, but nobody had ever seen one—until now.
In a new preprint study, researchers describe how they discovered a microblazar “hiding in plain sight,” said Josep Martí, an astronomer at the University of Jaén in Spain and lead author of the paper, in a statement.
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The system is around 12,000 light-years from Earth and consists of a star and black hole orbiting each other. Because they’re so close together, the black hole draws matter from the star. The black hole absorbs some of this material and shoots some of it toward Earth. The ejected plasma travels at around three quarters of the speed of light.
Astronomers previously knew about this object, Martí said, but it was clouded by dust and never thoroughly analyzed.
“It sits behind so much dust that it is practically invisible in standard optical images,” he said. “It was catalogued decades ago and then was more or less forgotten.”
Now that they’ve found the microblazar, astronomers want to learn all they can, including how it evolved, how the jets interact with interstellar medium and whether more systems like this exist in our galaxy.
The study was released as a preprint on September 1 and has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.