Astrophysicists are still puzzling over how massive particles get turbo-boosted, and how the universe churns out ultra-energetic photons and ghostly neutrinos. It’s one of space science’s biggest mysteries.
Astronomers have spotted a cosmic oddball, and it’s staring straight at Earth. Meet PKS 1424+240, a blazar so intense and mysterious, it’s been nicknamed the “Eye of Sauron” for its fiery, glowing gaze.
Using one of the most powerful radio telescope networks on Earth, the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), an international team of scientists teamed up to study this distant blazar, located billions of light-years away.
It looks slow in radio waves, yet it’s one of the brightest sources of gamma rays and neutrinos ever seen. This weird mismatch, called the “Doppler factor crisis,” has scientists scratching their heads about how these space jets work.
Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded MuSES project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said, “The NSF VLBA’s extraordinary resolution has allowed us to peer directly into the heart of this cosmic monster. We discovered that this blazar’s jet is aimed at us with pinpoint precision – within just 0.6 degrees of our line of sight.”
After 15 years of ultra-sharp space gazing using the NSF’s VLBA, a network of 10 giant radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, astronomers stitched together 42 images to reveal the blazar PKS 1424+240 in stunning detail.
The result?
A glowing jet with a perfect donut-shaped magnetic field, and a look so intense, scientists say it resembles the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings.
Jack Livingston, a co-author at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said, “This is like looking at car headlights from the Moon – the NSF VLBA’s incredible precision made it possible. What we found was a nearly perfect toroidal magnetic field structure threading the jet of plasma. It’s creating what looks remarkably like the Eye of Sauron from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.”
Because the blazar’s jet is aimed almost directly at Earth, it creates a relativistic “searchlight” effect, making it appear up to 30 times brighter than it is. That’s why it shows up as one of the brightest neutrino sources ever seen by the IceCube Observatory in Antarctica, even though its plasma jet seems slow in radio images.
This discovery shows just how powerful Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is. By linking radio telescopes from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, the NSF VLBA acts like one giant super-eye, so sharp that it could read a newspaper in New York from Los Angeles.
The research connects the dots between relativistic plasma jets, high-energy neutrinos, and magnetic fields, the key ingredients in nature’s most extreme particle accelerators. It’s a significant leap forward in multimessenger astronomy, where scientists decode the universe using light, particles, and more.
Journal Reference:
- Y. Y. Kovalev, A. B. Pushkarev et al. Looking into the jet cone of the neutrino-associated very high-energy blazar PKS 1424+240. Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202555400