Astronomers Find 'Microblazar' - Black Hole with Gamma-Ray Jet Pointed at Earth

Published 09/28/2026 at 9:55 p.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Portland, Oregon) – Cue the freaky electronic sci-fi music: there's a high-energy jet of radiation pointed right at Earth. (Above: artist's conception of the black hole and its jets. (The jet on the left is aimed almost at Earth and is brightened by its motion; the one on the right is aimed away and is invisible, betrayed only by the brilliant hotspot it creates where it collides with a molecular cloud. Credit: B. Marcote (JIVE/ASTRON).)

Luckily, it's far away enough we don't have to worry about it.

Astronomers say they have identified what is the first convincing microblazar in the Milky Way - a binary system in which a black hole is firing a jet of matter at nearly the speed of light almost directly toward Earth. It has an opposite jet, too. That one appears to be slamming into a distant cloud of gas and may be responsible for some of the most energetic particles ever recorded.

According to the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), researchers had spent more than 30 years searching for an object they were certain should exist in our Galaxy but had never been able to confirm. Now, they have. An international team led by scientists in Spain, the Netherlands, and Argentina has now found it behind a dense curtain of interstellar dust roughly 12,000 light-years away.

The system, IRAS 18293−0941, contains a hot, massive star, which is in turn orbited every 11.38 days by a black hole. Gas flowing from the star into the black hole is partly consumed, while the rest is expelled in two opposing jets traveling at about three-quarters the speed of light. What sets this system apart is the orientation of those jets: one is aimed almost straight at Earth.

Oregon Coast Beach Connection: Life under the ocean off the Oregon coast would likely survive such a radioactive swipe.

If it wasn't for that jet streaming our way we wouldn't know it was happening. It usually takes just that for us humans to even be able to detect any kind of gamma-ray burst.

They do have their dangers. Scientists are seeing evidence that at least one great extinction event on Earth came from such an event – though that's far from conclusive.

NASA says if any such gamma-ray does cut through us, it'll wipe much of the Earth clean of life.

“The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's protective ozone layer,” NASA has said in the past. “Recovery could take at least five years. With the ozone layer damaged, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun could kill much of the life on land and near the surface of oceans and lakes, and disrupt the food chain.”

Outside the Milky Way, supermassive black holes in distant galaxies produce similar jets that, when pointed toward us, create extremely bright and violent objects known as blazars.

The idea of these smaller blazars has been around since the 1990s, theorists have argued that smaller versions should exist in our own Galaxy, dubbing them microblazars. None had survived detailed scrutiny until now. Josep Martí of the University of Jaén, the study's lead author, said the object had been catalogued decades ago but overlooked because thick dust rendered it nearly invisible in optical images.

The second jet, directed away from Earth, cannot be seen directly. But radio observations from the MeerKAT array in South Africa reveal its impact: a vast bubble about 100 light-years across carved into the surrounding gas. At the bubble's far edge sits a compact, brilliant radio hotspot where the jet appears to collide with the interstellar medium, accelerating particles, heating dust, and causing hydrogen gas to glow.

The universe, seen from Bandon on the south Oregon coast. Photo Manuela Durson - Manuela Durson Fine Arts

That same location aligns with detections from several high-energy observatories - LHAASO in China, HAWC in Mexico, H.E.S.S. in Namibia, and NASA's Fermi satellite - all reporting gamma-ray photons exceeding 100 trillion electronvolts. These energies are more than ten times what the Large Hadron Collider can impart to a single proton. The origin of such Galactic “PeVatrons” remains one of astrophysics' major unresolved questions, and IRAS 18293−0941 now stands as a prime candidate for answering it, say SARAO scientists.

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