Astronomers have discovered what they called “Sauron’s eye” in space, the image of a cosmic jet directly directed towards the earth. It is a throw of hot plasma which extends over huge distances at a speed close to that of light.
The “½il de Sauron” – named after the dark power of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy – comes from the Blazar PKS 1424+240, located about ten billion light years from the earth. Blazars are nuclei of active galaxies fueled by a supermassive black hole and which emit a plasma jet.
PKS 1424+240 is considered to be the brightest object in the sky, emitting neutrinos – electrically neutral elementary particles of very low mass – as well as very high energy gamma rays, such as those produced by the disintegration of radioactive nuclei.
Curiously, his plasma jet seemed to move slowly, which contradicts expectations that only the fastest jets can produce such intense and high energy emissions.
“Never seen something comparable”
Using the very long Baseline Array (VLBA) – A specialized telescope system – a team led by Yuri Kovalev from the Max Planck Institute in Radioastronomic in Bonn has created a detailed image of this jet with the best resolution to date, according to these works published in the magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters. The VLBA consists of ten antennas of 25 meters each, spread over all of the United States, including Hawaii and the Virgin Islands.
“When we rebuilt the image, it was really breathtaking,” said Yuri Kovalev, quoted in a press release from his institute. “We had never seen something comparable before – an almost perfect annular magnetic field with a jet pointing directly in our direction,” adds the researcher.
The fact that the jet seemed to move that slowly was therefore an optical illusion, simply caused by the fact that it is oriented exactly towards the earth.
Surprisingly, the unscientific name “Sauron eye” returns several times in the publication. “The publishers have accepted it because the image is so fantastic,” said Yuri Kovalev to the German news agency DPA.
This article was published automatically. Sources: ATS / DPA
