Saturday, 26 November 2022

Some black holes tend to act as cosmic particle accelerators

 

Image courtesy of Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo. 

Joel Kontinen

Some black holes can accelerate particles to extraordinarily high energies at us. A black hole called a blazar does it.

Recently, “a new X-ray space telescope called the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has made this possible for the first time. Yannis Liodakis at the University of Turku in Finland and his colleagues used it to look at a particularly bright blazar called Markarian 501.”

Source:

Crane, Leah . 2022. We may finally know how blazars act as cosmic particle accelerators. New Scientist 23 November.