Featured Image Credit: Y.Y. Kovalev et al
Scientists have published a picture of the horrifying ‘Eye of Sauron’ which is pointed straight at Earth.
The ‘eye’ is actually the nucleus of a supermassive black hole that is emitting radiation.
While initially named ‘PKS 1424+240’, it has become known as the ‘Eye of Sauron’ in reference to JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
This is due to the fact that the ‘eye’ is pointing straight at Earth as if it is looking out to humanity.
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In the center of the ‘eye’ is a jet stream of plasma that is being shot outwards towards our planet.
However, we don’t need to start panicking just yet because the object is luckily located a whopping 7.4 billion light years away, which is far enough to mean that it doesn’t pose much of a threat to us.
A terrifying image of the object has been published by a team of scientists in a new paper in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.
In the paper, it explains: “We call the image (after J. R. R. Tolkien) ‘the Eye of Sauron’ because its nature is striking and resembles the illustrator’s (Alan Lee) views of the villain in the ‘Lord of the Rings’. Linear integral convolution was applied to the polarized intensity to visualize the morphology of the magnetic field lines by locally blurring the intensity variations in the direction of the magnetic field to effectively trace its structure.
“The image reveals a significant toroidal magnetic field component of a current-carrying jet that flows almost directly toward Earth.”
However, the astronomers also found that the jet stream is actually slower than they initially thought, describing the movement as ‘sluggish’ and detailing how it is kind of an ‘optical illusion’.
Jack Livingston, who is a co-author of the study and a researcher at Max Planck, said: “This alignment causes a boost in brightness by a factor of 30 or more.
“At the same time, the jet appears to move slowly due to projection effects - a classic optical illusion.”
The paper goes on to state: “Blazars with very small jet viewing angles offer a solution to the Doppler factor crisis, i.e., to the longstanding mismatch between Doppler factors inferred from the low apparent jet speed in very long-baseline interferometry and those derived from VHE observations.
“We show that relativistic beaming plays the critical role in the gamma-ray and neutrino emission of blazars. This has direct implications for models of their multimessenger emission.”
