Astronomers have discovered in space what they are calling an 'eye of Sauron,’ the image of a cosmic jet directed straight towards the Earth.
The jet of hot plasma, which extends over enormous distances, travels at a speed close to that of light.
The ‘Eye of Sauron’ — named after the dark power in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy — comes from the PKS 1424+240 blazar, located about ten billion light-years from Earth.
(Blazars are active galactic nuclei powered by a supermassive black hole that emits a jet of plasma.)
PKS 1424+240 is considered the brightest object in the sky, emitting neutrinos – electrically neutral elementary particles with very low mass – as well as very high-energy gamma rays, such as those produced by the decay of radioactive nuclei.
Curiously, its plasma jet appeared to be moving slowly, contradicting expectations that only the fastest jets can produce such intense, high-energy emissions.
Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) – a specialised telescope system – a team led by Yuri Kovalev of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn has created a detailed image of this jet, with the best resolution to date, according to a report published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters journal.
The VLBA consists of ten 25-metre antennae spread across the United States, including Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
"When we reconstructed the image, it was truly breathtaking," Yuri Kovalev is quoted as saying in a press release from his institute. "We had never seen anything like this before – an almost perfect, ring-shaped, magnetic field with a jet pointing directly in our direction."
The fact that the jet appeared to be moving slowly was therefore an optical illusion, caused simply by the fact that it has been pointing directly towards Earth.
Surprisingly, the unscientific name ‘Eye of Sauron’ appears several times in the publication. "The editors accepted it because the image is so fantastic," Yuri Kovalev told dpa.
