Scientists think they have discovered an entirely new type of object in space – and it’s spat something radioactive right at us.
But if you ask Josep Martí, an astronomer at the University of Jaén in Spain, this is very much a good thing.
The goo, made of plasma – the fourth state of matter – could be the proof Martí has been looking for of a long-theorised ‘microblazar’.
Regular blazars are a type of quasar: monstrous black holes at the centre of galaxies that squeeze matter out like toothpaste into a fiery jet.
A microblazar is the same thing, but on a much smaller scale, Martí writes in a study accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
‘I have always been impressed by how Mother Nature mimics itself at very different scales,’ he tells Metro.
‘Somehow, it reminds me of the analogy between the solar system and the electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom.’
Do we have anything to worry about?
What’s holding this slime bucket is IRAS 18293−0941, a stellar black hole, or a cosmic hungry-hungry hippo formed out of a collapsed star.
The black hole orbits a giant, hot star, which it constantly nibbles on and spits out as two violent jets of fiery energy.
This tracks with what scientists believe a microblazar could be.
‘Microquasars have jets, but they are powered by small black holes with a modest mass of about 10 times that of our Sun,’ Martí says.
‘In microquasars, the black hole feeding comes from matter
captured from a single stellar companion orbiting the black hole.
‘When, by chance, the jets are pointing close to our line of sight,
these systems are known as blazars and microblazars, respectively.’
One of these angry flares is aimed straight at Earth, Martí and his team found, travelling at about 75% of the speed of light.
‘Concerning possible worries, please stay calm. None at all. These objects are very, very far away,’ Martí says.
He’s not kidding. The microblazar is in our galaxy and about 12,000 light-years from Earth, or about 70,500,500,400,000,000 miles.
However, if Earth were to be caught in the microblazar’s firing line, it wouldn’t be pretty.
‘We would experience a significant increase in radiation effects,’ Martí says.
‘Depending on distance and crossing time, electronic devices and living beings could suffer negative consequences.
‘However, this is not a realistic hypothesis and no risk of this kind exists. Humankind has many other problems to worry about.’
Although IRAS 18293−0941 was discovered in 1983, a thick veil of dust makes it practically invisible to Earthly telescopes.
To observe IRAS 18293-0941, the study authors used a Swiss Army Knife’s worth of archival data and telescopes, including the Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory in Spain and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa.
If a binary star system, or a pair of stars that dance around one another, is just the right size, they might wind up as a microblazar.
They don’t last very long at cosmic scales – a mere 100,000 or so years – so Martí says it was almost a fluke that they managed to spot one.
Kinwah Wu, a theoretical astrophysicist at University College London who was not involved in the research, says finding a microblazar is a big deal.
‘We can use them to study a lot of fundamental and most extreme
processes in astrophysics and physics,’ she tells Metro.
Professor Wu says this could include how particles move at breakneck speeds, or if they’re a source of the energetic cosmic rays showering Earth.
‘They are rare, powerful sources within our own galaxy,’ she adds.
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