An international team of astronomers has unveiled a stunning image of a cosmic jet aimed directly at Earth, revealing the long-sought explanation for the extraordinary brightness of the blazar PKS 1424+240. The discovery, published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, shows the blazar’s jet as a glowing “Eye of Sauron” in deep space – its plasma stream threaded by a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field and aligned almost exactly with our line of sight.
PKS 1424+240 has puzzled scientists for years: despite its slow-looking radio jet, it is one of the brightest known sources of high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos. Using 15 years of ultra-precise observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), researchers created the sharpest image yet of its jet, revealing that relativistic beaming from the head-on orientation boosts its apparent brightness by more than 30 times.
“This alignment is a cosmic illusion,” said lead author Yuri Kovalev of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. “The jet appears sluggish, but its energy output is immense — and it’s aimed straight at us.”
The finding strengthens the link between blazar jets, high-energy neutrinos, and the role of magnetic fields in accelerating particles to extreme energies — a key goal of multi-messenger astronomy. The work builds on decades of monitoring by the MOJAVE program and is part of the EU-funded MuSES project. Read more here.
Image: The “Eye of Sauron” — a striking image of the plasma jet in the blazar PKS 1424+240, seen head-on. The jet is threaded by a nearly perfect toroidal magnetic field (visualized in orange). Due to special relativity, high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos are strongly beamed toward Earth, even though the jet appears slow-moving from our perspective. © Y.Y. Kovalev et al.