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Scientists discover a supermassive black hole pointing directly at Earth

A team of international astronomers has made a groundbreaking discovery of a supermassive black hole, located 657 million light-years away in the PBC J2333.9-2343 galaxy, which has changed its direction and is now facing Earth .

The team of astronomers previously classified it as a radio galaxy but changed classification due to a unique activity within the core of the galaxy.

When two jets (a jet composed of ionised matter travelling at nearly the speed of light) point towards the plane of the sky, they are classified as a radio galaxy, but if one of the jets points towards Earth, then the active galactic nucleus of the galaxy is known as a blazar.

Data on the galaxy was obtained from the German 100m-Radio Telescope Effelsberg at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the Yale University 1.3m-SMARTS optical telescope, and the Penn State Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The team’s work is published in the monthly notices of the UK-based Royal Astronomical Society.

Dr Lorena Hernández-García, lead author of the paper and researcher at the Millenium Institute of Astrophysics , says, “We started to study this galaxy as it showed peculiar properties. Our hypothesis was that the relativistic jet of its supermassive black hole had changed its direction, and to confirm that idea we had to carry out a lot of observations.”

The team does not yet know what caused the drastic change in direction of the jets. It speculates that it could have been a merging event with another galaxy or any other relatively large object, or a strong burst of activity in the galactic nucleus after a dormant period.

PBC J2333.9-2343, happens to have a blazar in its core. Blazars are very high energy objects and considered to be one of the most powerful phenomena in the universe. These move in circles around a strong magnetic field, causing the emission of radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The research has revealed that in PBC J2333.9-2343, the jet changed its direction drastically by an angle of up to 90 degrees, going from being in the plane of the sky, perpendicular to our line of sight, to pointing directly towards the Earth. “With the jet pointing in our direction, the emission is strongly enhanced and can easily exceed that coming from the rest of the galaxy. This in turn drives high-intensity flares stronger than those coming from other radio galaxies, thus changing its categorisation,” the study said. Using the observational data, the team concluded that this galaxy has a bright blazar in the centre, with two lobes in the outer areas of the jet.

To find out more about this mysterious galaxy , astronomers have to observe it across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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