NASA's IXPE fires up astronomers with new blazar findings
The universe is full of powerful supermassive black holes that create powerful jets of high-energy particles, creating sources of extreme brightness in the vastness of space. When one of those jets points directly at Earth, scientists call the black hole system a blazar. To understand why particles in the jet move with great speeds and energies, scientists look to NASA's IXPE (Imaging X-ra