Scientists are baffled after spotting the 'Eye of Sauron' in deep space
The flaming, floating fiery eyeball, positioned atop a dark tower in Mordor, is a symbol of the Dark Lord's all–seeing power and vigilance.
Now, experts have detected a similarly terrifying vision in real life.
But rather than looking for Frodo or the Ring, it seems to be peering directly at us from deep space.
The image is of a phenomenon called a cosmic jet, which is an extremely powerful stream of plasma and energy emitted from celestial objects.
This particular one comes from a blazar – a type of galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole.
The PKS 1424+240 blazar is one of the brightest in the sky despite being located billions of light–years away.
And as well as a foreboding picture, the discovery may have helped researchers solve a decades–long cosmic puzzle.
The blazar has long baffled astronomers as its cosmic jet appeared to move slowly, despite it being one of the brightest sources of high–energy gammas rays and cosmic neutrinos ever observed.
This contradicted the belief that only the fastest jets could be behind such exceptional brightness.
Using 15 years of ultra–precise radio observations from the Very Long Baseline Array – a system of 10 radio telescopes – researchers were able to stitch together a deep image of the jet at unparalleled resolution.
'When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning,' lead author Yuri Kovalev, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said.
'We have never seen anything quite like it—a near–perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us.'
Since the jet is aligned almost exactly in the direction of Earth, its high–energy radio emissions are dramatically amplified.
'This alignment causes a boost in brightness by a factor of 30 or more,' co–author Jack Livingston said.
'At the same time, the jet appears to move slowly due to projection effects—a classic optical illusion.'
This head–on view also gave scientists the extremely rare opportunity to peer directly into the heart of the blazar's jet.
Radio signals helped the team map out the structure of the jet's magnetic field, revealing it is likely helical (a spiral) or toroidal (doughnut–shaped).
This structure likely plays a key role in accelerating particles to extreme energies, the researchers said.
The findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
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A supernova burns for only a short period of time, but it can tell scientists a lot about how the universe began. One kind of supernova has shown scientists that we live in an expanding universe, one that is growing at an ever increasing rate. Scientists have also determined that supernovas play a key role in distributing elements throughout the universe. There are two known types of supernova. The first type occurs in binary star systems when one of the two stars, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf, steals matter from its companion star. Eventually, the white dwarf accumulates too much matter, causing the star to explode, resulting in a supernova. The second type of supernova occurs at the end of a single star's lifetime. As the star runs out of nuclear fuel, some of its mass flows into its core. Eventually, the core is so heavy it can't stand its own gravitational force and the core collapses, resulting in another giant explosion. Many elements found on Earth are made in the core of stars and these elements travel on to form new stars, planets and everything else in the universe.
