Using data from the recently deployed Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer orbiting observatory, researchers on Wednesday offered an explanation for how these jets become so luminous: subatomic particles called electrons becoming energized by shock waves moving at supersonic speed away from the black hole.
Blazars are a subset of objects called quasars that are powered by supermassive black holes feeding on gas and other material at the center of galaxies and sending two jets of particles in opposite directions into space. Blazars are oriented such that one of their two jets from our vantage point on Earth is heading directly at us.
IXPE, launched last December as a collaboration between the U.S. space agency NASA and the Italian Space Agency, measures the brightness and polarization - a property of light involving the orientation of the electromagnetic waves - of X-ray light from cosmic sources. Different phenomena, like shock waves or turbulence, present polarization "signatures."
"The light that we see from the jets comes from electrons," said Boston University astrophysicist and study co-author Alan Marscher. "X-rays of the type that we observe in Markarian 501 can only come from extremely high-energy electrons."