Yesterday afternoon on my bike ride home from work I stopped by the Physics and Astrophysics building on Stanford's main campus to speak to a scientist about a possible story. Every Friday, SLAC releases summaries of all the scientific papers published by SLAC personnel. The idea came from one of these papers.
I have yet to attempt to write an actual article about all that I learned, which was a ton. It's going to be a challenge to figure out how best to explain the topic, blazars, while not boring anyone or getting long-winded. So, as an experiment, I'm going to try to explain it conversationally here first.
In this way, I hope to fully get my head around the subject and also figure out what exactly the main points are that I need to get across in the future article.
So, here we go.
Scientists believe that the center of every galaxy contains a Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH). This is exactly what it sounds like, a big ass black hole, up to 2 billion times bigger than our sun, which is simply unimaginable.
Some of these are "active," meaning that they are currently spewing forth large amounts of particles in a jet stream. If you think of a galaxy as a Frisbee, the streams are shooting straight out from the center in both directions.
These streams contain electrons, positrons, and protons. These particles interact with a surrounding magnetic field to create radiation and photons. These, in turn, also interact with electrons to produce gamma rays. Nobody is quite sure how these processes happen, or where they happen, but they happen.
These galaxies with active SMBHs spewing out streams of particles are known as quasars. When the jets are more or less pointing straight at us, one stream appears much stronger and dominates the other stream pointing away from us. These are called "blazars."
There is one blazar close enough for scientists to study in detail; a galaxy known as M187. And in the jet stream coming out of M187 are several bright "knots" of "stuff." Nobody quite knows what's going on in them, but we can see them, and study them, which is what the scientists did.
They pointed observation instruments at one knot in particular for several years. In early 2005, emissions of x-rays, light, and radio waves from the knot spiked. At the same time, another experiment recorded a spike in the gamma rays emanating from the blazar as a whole. Thus, they have deduced that the gamma rays are coming from the knot.
This may not seem very exciting, and in reality, it isn't terribly. But this proves that gamma rays are coming from a place 100 times further away from the SMBH than scientists previously thought possible. This raises many interesting questions about the processes occurring in the blazar and the jet stream, and could make scientists rethink some of their assumptions about blazars in general.
The end.
Now I'm going to try to cut this in 1/3, make it more readable, and more interesting.
Wish me luck.
2 comments:
I liked this article better than the other one. This one started from the beginning in explaining Blazars. I seemed to understand everything better by reading this article.
I think you're right Randy. This flows a lot more logically and explains it a hell of a lot better. Unfortunately, one can't write like this. Stories demand you start with a lead to grab a reader's attention, THEN a nut graph to explain why the story is important, and THEN you can launch into the full explanation.
You're so kindly reading my blog, and going to read that text anyways. Somebody cruising the internet or a newspaper would probably not find the first paragraph interesting enough to keep reading. Either that, or they'd get two or three paragraphs down and think, "Where the hell is he going with this? Why should I care? Why am I reading this again?"
Hopefully the final version can take the best from both worlds...
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