Shockwaves in jets of matter that stream towards Earth from blazars seem to be the driving force behind the extraordinarily high energies reached by particles in the jets
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Astronomers may have solved a major mystery about the supermassive black holes at the centres of some galaxies. A subset of these black holes called blazarstowards Earth, and we may now know how the particles in those jets reach such high energies. Researchers have known about these jets for decades, but we have never been able to look into the heart of a blazar before to see how it accelerates particles. A new X-ray space telescope called the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer has made this possible for the first time.at the University of Turku in Finland and his colleagues used it to look at a particularly bright blazar called Markarian 501.
“When we look at optical light and radio waves, we’re looking at the jet itself, far away from where the acceleration takes place. And there, the theoretical models basically all look the same,” says Liodakis. “But with X-rays you can go super close to the accelerator, where the magic takes place, and that is where we can discriminate between the models.”
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