Earlier this year, a NASA telescope registered a torrent of powerful gamma rays from a galaxy half the universe away.
The light came from a galaxy called PKS 1441+25. But for simplicity, we'll call the galaxy Gladys. Gladys is a blazar, which means she has a supermassive black hole at her center. Gladys' black hole is about 70 million times as big as our sun. In fact, according to NASA, if you put that black hole at the center of our solar system, it would suck up everything all the way to Mars.
As material around the black hole gets sucked toward it like so many Dorothies and Totos, some of that material forms particle jets that shoot out into space at almost the speed of light. These gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, and since one of the jets points right at Earth, astronomers can metaphorically stare straight into the black hole's belly.
In April, some of these rays were spotted by one Luigi Pacciani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, in Rome, who leads a project to catch blazar flares. During this event, his equipment caught gamma rays up to 33 billion electron volts — up to 15 billion times as strong as the light we detect with our eyes. He worked with a team from the Canary Islands called the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cerenkov experiment — yes, MAGIC — to figure out where the light was from and what it means.
Because Gladys is so far away, astronomers have determined that the light we just perceived was actually shot out into space over 7 billion years ago, when our universe was just half the age it is now. It would take another 2 billion years for our Earth to appear.
Although all of this happened in April, the data have just now been crunched to give context and meaning to the unique event.
If all of that sounds like gibberish to you, check out NASA's video below. If nothing else, it will make you feel like an itty bitty insignificant speck. As if you didn't already feel that way during the holidays.
You can read NASA's full conclusions about these findings here.
