Free Republic

Look out, Frodo!A bright galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole that spews out cosmic radiation is pointing straight at us. Thankfully, the object, unimaginatively dubbed “PKS 1424+240,” is located roughly 7.4 billion light-years away and likely won’t pose much of a danger. But that hasn’t stopped a group of excited astronomers from renaming it: the “Eye of Sauron,” the symbol adopted by the Dark Lord in JRR Tolkien’s epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. A new image of the object was recently unveiled, revealing a bright, hot center with cosmic waves spinning around it, spewing a jet of plasma...

Looking inside the plasma jet cone of the blazar PKS 1424+240 with a radio telescope of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). Credit: NSF/AUI/NRAO/B. Saxton/Y.Y. Kovalev et al. ==================================================================================== A cosmic jet aimed at Earth reveals how blazars hurl particles to extreme energies, solving a long-standing mystery. Key Points * A glimpse into a galaxy’s core: Astronomers have captured a detailed image of the birthplace of a powerful cosmic jet. With its artificial colors, the view strikingly resembles the legendary “Eye of Sauron.” * The neutrino puzzle: PKS 1424+240 stands out as the brightest known source of neutrinos of its...

Artist’s impression of the bright, very early active galactic nucleus that was found by Bañados and his colleagues, which has fundamental implications for black hole growth in the earliest billion or so years of cosmic history. Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton ======================================================================================= Astronomers have spotted a young, blazing black hole that was already growing at a furious pace just one billion years after the Big Bang. This rare discovery provides a key to understanding how supermassive black holes formed in the universe’s earliest days. Astronomers have identified a crucial clue in understanding how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the...

A fiery-looking, red-orange energetic jet blasting bright light from the center of a galaxy. An artist's illustration of neutrinos originating from a high-energy Blazar Benjamin Amend, Clemson University Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number....

Nine hundred million years after the Big Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine — known as a blazar — that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later. Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are...

The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein. The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary...

SAN DIEGO -- If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or perform other leaps of cosmic logic.Fast forward a century. Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things --...

A team of astronomers have found a colossal black hole so ancient, they're not sure how it had enough time to grow to its current size, about 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. Sitting at the heart of a distant galaxy, the black hole appears to be about 12.7 billion years old, which means it formed just one billion years after the universe began and is one of the oldest supermassive black holes ever known. The black hole, researchers said, is big enough to hold 1,000 of our own Solar Systems and weighs about as much as...