Markarian 421 firing high-energy particle jet towards Earth: Markarian 421, a supermassive black hole 400 million light-years away from Earth, is emitting a high-energy particle jet.
Daily Current Affairs Quiz: July 2023
What’s in News?
NASA’s IXPE (X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has revealed some secrets about Markarian 421, a Supermassive Black Hole that is spewing a high-energy particle jet at Earth.
Markarian 421
Markarian 421 is a supermassive black hole which is firing high-energy particle jet aimed directly at Earth. It is located in the constellation Ursa Major. It is about 400 million light-years away from the Earth.
Supermassive Black Hole
A supermassive black hole is a highly enormous object that can grow by devouring gas, dust, stars, and planets at the cores of galaxies. They have such a powerful gravitational force that nothing can escape, not even light. They can have millions or billions of times the mass of our sun.
The origin of supermassive black holes is not entirely understood, but they are thought to have formed and grown through a combination of processes, including accretion of gas and the merging of smaller black holes over billions of years.
Supermassive Black holes are connected with tremendous phenomena like as active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars, which release massive amounts of energy when material falls into the black hole and emits intense radiation.
Characteristics of Supermassive Black Hole:
They have a mass greater than about 50,000 times the mass of our Sun. These black holes are far too large to have formed from the gravitational collapse of a single star. These are always found at the centre of the galaxies. All galaxies have supermassive black hole at its centre.
Jet of high-energy particles
It is a stream of matter and radiation that is ejected from the vicinity of a black hole at very high speeds, close to the speed of light. The jet is formed by the interaction of the black hole’s strong magnetic field and the rotating disk of material that surrounds it. The disc is known as an accretion field because it provides matter to the black hole.
Reason of Markarian 421’s jet pointing towards Earth
Markarian 421‘s jet is pointing towards Earth because Earth is in its line of sight. This makes it a special type of supermassive black hole system called a blazar.
Blazar: Blazars are extremely intense and variable sources of gamma rays and X-rays because the jet’s radiation is amplified by a phenomena known as relativistic beaming.
