Blazars -New Clues to the Most Violently Energetic Objects in the Universe

An international team of researchers have stared down the barrel of one of the most violently energetic objects in the universe - and they didn't blink.  Instead, they've figured out the physics behind one of the most impressive astrophysical events in existence.

BL Lacertae is a blazar, a supermassive galactic-core black hole emitting vast and variable beams of energy.  Please understand that giving this thing a name like "blazar" is like calling a speeding sixteen wheeler truck full of professional wrestlers, grizzly bears and dynamite a "gentle prodder." The English language simply lacks the ability to get across the staggering scale of these events - because it doesn't have a case above upper or letters bigger than capital.  You can try writing down the values as numbers, but they end up being so stupidly huge that our monkey brains, programmed to deal with "one two three lots", just don't comprehend them.

The most famous property of black holes is the event horizon, the "point of no return" beyond which you cannot escape.  But even before this final barrier you're still close to a gigantic gravitational well built out of most of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - if not a point of no return, it's still a "point of incredibly difficult to escape from".  We observe vast, super-energetic near-light speed particle streams from the poles of some such systems - what gives them the power?

That was the question Professor Alan Marscher and an international team set out to answer, confirming their theories with observations of the inner workings of the BL Lac blazar particle stream.  Big questions need big tools (especially when they're over nine hundred million miles away), so they enlisted the help of a global network of satellites including the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA), a continental set of dishes with resolution equivalent to a dish larger than America.

These mega-scale observations tracked particles as they were hurled from the throat of the blazar, emitting radiation as they go, and confirmed the team's theories that the power source is massively compressed and twisted magnetic fields.  As material is sucked into the black hole, it spirals in along a large accretion disk.  As it gets closer to being consumed, the material is crushed smaller and smaller by increasing gravitational forces - and the magnetic field lines coming along with it are crushed together as well, creating hugely intense fields oriented around the spinning black hole.  These gigantic fields can drive particles away from the hole, causing them to corkscrew along a narrowly confined path while emitting precise bursts of radiation - bursts the astronomers observed exactly.

Understanding these universe-grade events is a great step forward in astrophysics - for one thing, The BL Lacertae blazar is a particle accelerator that makes the LHC look like an asthmatic child throwing pebbles.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

The Odd Case of Galaxy 0402+379 -The Greatest Unexploded Bomb in Existence
Ghost Beacon Signals Site of Massive Black Hole -One Billion Supernovas Massive!
18 Billion Suns -A Galaxy Classic: Biggest Black Hole in Universe Discovered—and it’s BIG
Neutron Stars: New Discovery Proves Einstein's Space-Time Predictions
Mystery Neutron Star Discovered
Black Holes Key to Mapping the Evolution of the Universe

Magnetic Power Jets

Comments

[Jeff]

"Big questions need big tools (especially when they're over nine hundred million miles away)"

Maybe I just read this wrong, but 900,000,000 miles seems pretty close (astronomically) to us. Especially since the dwarf planet Pluto is about 3,670,000,000 miles from the sun. Maybe they meant billion?

[bh]

This article is unreadable. Can you just write the science without inappropriate similes- "asthmatic child throwing pebbles" "speeding sixteen wheeler truck full of professional wrestlers"??

[Eleventeen]

Yes but you just know in a couple years GM will have a series of focus groups and they'll decide what people really want is a heavier version of this and they'll release TrailBlazars and then discontinue the older ones.

[John]

a light year is like 5.5 trillion miles. the nearest start is about 4 light years. so....

[Jack]

I agree with all the above comments. Author just got the math wrong. closest supermassive galactic-core black hole is ours. Around 35k light years.

Side note: too bad we live in the boonies, i wish we were part of a globular cluster where other suns were .02 light years so we could realistically jump around and explore. I realize it has its draw back, is if one star goes off, there goes the neighborhood.

[Eric]

I see folks already noted the distance. I was thinking if you were to add a couple more "million"s to the text, you'd be within an order of magnitude of right. I rather liked the "inappropriate similies," except as possibly being offensive to asthmatic children.

[Jack Again]

I found an article that speaks of the origin more clearly.
"M87, at 50 million light-years from Earth"
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090702-black-hole-radiation.html

[toby]

Lol I knew people would comment on the child thing at the end.
People are too sensitive these days.
Why are you worrying about such petty things after being confronted by the awesomeness of a Blazar.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Blazars can help us understand the processes that shaped / shape our Universe, albeit from incomprehensible distances. Studying them, even from millions of light years away, can perhaps grant us a flicker of insight into the energies that went into the Big Bang.

As inappropriate & perhaps flippant / annoying as McKinney's comments can be, I think I can overlook them to appreciate the significance of blazars, & the beauty of the processes underlying them.

[bitirim]

thank you

sohbet siteleri sohbet sitesi sohbet odaları sohbet kanalları sohbet seviyeli sohbet

[astrophysics11]

Umm...don't they call this a Quazar??

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Regarding Jack's post of 2nd July -

If we lived in a globular cluster, things might be more interesting from an astronomical / astrophysical point of view, but if a nearby star went nova, or there was a gravitational shift of some kind, life on our fragile little world would either suffer or be wiped out, as surely as if we were hit by a celestial version of Mr. McKinney's " sixteen wheeler truck full of professional wrestlers ", etc.

Just be happy that Earth is where it is. We have a " comfort zone " of sorts here in the boonies. Threats of asteroid collisions, meteor showers & changes in Solar activity ( Like flares & CME's ) can be exciting enough.....