This illustration shows NASA’s IXPE spacecraft, at right, observing blazar Markarian 501, at left. A blazar is a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and dust with a bright jet of high-energy particles pointed toward Earth. The inset illustration shows
This illustration shows NASA's IXPE spacecraft, at right, observing blazar Markarian 501, at left. A blazar is a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and dust with a bright jet of high-energy particles pointed toward Earth. The inset illustration shows - Powerful jets of material released by black holes are accelerated far into space by shock waves within the jets, an international collaboration involving UCL researchers has found. The study, published in Nature , helps to solve a decades-old mystery about how these jets are produced. The research team was able to rule out alternative causes of the jets - such as magnetic reconnection - and, out of a number of theoretical models of how the particles in the jets are accelerated, showed that just one model was correct. Researchers looked at Markarian 501, a galaxy 456 million light years away, which emits what is known as a blazar - a powerful jet that is especially bright to us because it points towards Earth. They analysed data from NASA's Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, which launched last December, along with observations from a range of other telescopes in space and on the ground.
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