Astronomers Detect 'Eye of Sauron' Billions of Light Years Away, Potentially Discovering the Most Potent Particle Speedup Ever Known
Breakthrough Discovery Reveals the 'Eye of Sauron' Magnetic Field in a Distant Blazar
A team of astronomers has made a groundbreaking discovery about PKS 1424+240, a distant blazar billions of light-years away from Earth. Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of ten radio antennas, they have uncovered a toroidal (ring-shaped) magnetic field in the blazar's jet, resembling the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings series.
This magnetic field acts as a coiled spring, efficiently accelerating protons to extremely high energies. These accelerated protons are the likely source of the high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
The blazar's jet is oriented almost directly towards Earth with an exceptionally small viewing angle (less than half a degree), which maximizes relativistic boosting effects and explains the relatively low apparent jet speed. This geometry enhances particle acceleration and emission processes inside the jet.
The toroidal magnetic field forms a near-perfect ring around the jet, creating strong magnetic tension and electric fields. This magnetic configuration can transfer energy efficiently to charged particles, particularly protons, accelerating them to energies sufficient to produce very high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos.
The highly ordered magnetic field structure is critical for sustaining the environment needed for proton acceleration to ultra-high energies relevant for neutrino production. The current-carrying jet is tightly collimated within a plasma cone and threaded by this stable toroidal field, which sustains relativistic particle acceleration over parsec scales near the central black hole.
The accelerated protons interact with surrounding matter or photon fields, producing charged pions that decay into neutrinos detected by IceCube. This mechanistic link explains why PKS 1424+240 is one of the brightest neutrino-emitting blazars despite its slow apparent jet speed.
The discovery provides further evidence supporting the role of supermassive black holes in particle acceleration. Anton Zensus, the program's co-founder, stated that the observations are making the idea of connecting distant black hole jets to cosmic neutrinos real.
The work strengthens the link between magnetic fields and the most extreme particle accelerators in the universe. The findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and this discovery is a triumph for the MOJAVE program, a decades-long VLBA campaign to track jets in active galaxies.
Interestingly, the jet only appears slow due to projection effects, a classic optical illusion. Despite its sluggish appearance, PKS 1424+240 is the brightest known blazar emitting neutrinos and very high-energy gamma rays. This discovery opens up new avenues for studying the most extreme environments in the universe.
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