Astronomers have captured what looks like the mythical “Eye of Sauron” in the distant Universe — and it may have just solved a decade-long cosmic puzzle.
An international team of researchers achieved a breakthrough in understanding how a seemingly slow-moving blazar, known as PKS 1424+240, could be one of the brightest sources of high-energy gamma rays and cosmic neutrinos ever observed. Their results are published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.
Located billions of light-years away, the blazar PKS 1424+240 had long baffled astronomers. It stood out as the brightest known neutrino-emitting blazar in the sky — as identified by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory — and was also glowing in very high-energy gamma rays observed by ground-based Cherenkov telescopes. Yet, oddly, its radio jet appeared to move sluggishly, contradicting expectations that only the fastest jets can power such intense high-energy emissions.
Now, thanks to 15 years of ultra-precise radio observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), researchers have stitched together a deep image of this jet at unparalleled resolution and sensitivity. “When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning,” said Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study. “We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us.”
Because the jet is aligned almost exactly in the direction of Earth, its high-energy emission is dramatically amplified by the effects of special relativity.
Denison Professor of Physics and Astronomy Dan Homan, co-author of the study, said, “Jets of this type are some of the most powerful sustained phenomena in the Universe, and here we see direct evidence of the underlying dynamo – a gigantic battery powered by inflow of material onto the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.”
“The toroidal magnetic field of this kind is the hallmark of an electrical current flowing along the jet that points almost directly at us.”
This head-on geometry allowed scientists to peer directly into the heart of the blazar’s jet — an extremely rare opportunity. Polarized radio signals helped the team map out the structure of the jet’s magnetic field, revealing its likely helical or toroidal shape. This structure plays a key role in launching and collimating the plasma flow, and may be essential for accelerating particles to extreme energies.
“Solving this puzzle confirms that active galactic nuclei with supermassive black holes are not only powerful accelerators of electrons, but also of protons — the origin of the observed high-energy neutrinos,” concludes Kovalev.
The discovery is a triumph for the MOJAVE program, a decades-long effort to monitor relativistic jets in active galaxies using the VLBA. Scientists employ the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which connects radio telescopes across the globe to form a virtual telescope the size of the Earth. This provides the highest resolution available in astronomy, allowing them to study the fine details of distant cosmic jets.
“When we originally proposed MOJAVE, we hoped to image magnetic fields at the highest resolution and sensitivity possible, and this image is the realization of that dream,” explains Homan, who co-founded the project.
“Only by combining fifteen years of images, leveraging image and calibration improvements developed right here at Denison, could we hope to see the telltale signs of a magnetic field completely encompassing the jet as it rushes towards us,” Homan said.
This result strengthens the link between relativistic jets, high-energy neutrinos, and the role of magnetic fields in shaping cosmic accelerators — marking a milestone in multimessenger astronomy.
Additional Information
A blazar is a type of active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole that launches a jet of plasma moving at nearly the speed of light. What makes a blazar special is its orientation: one of its jets is pointed within about 10 degrees of Earth. This alignment makes blazars appear bright across the electromagnetic spectrum and allows scientists to study extreme physical processes — including the acceleration of particles to energies far beyond those achieved in human-made accelerators.
The VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array) is an array of ten antennas, at locations across the continental United States and in Hawaii and St Croix, which operates in the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) mode. Spacings between the antennas vary up to approximately ten thousand kilometers, providing angular resolution on the sky as fine as 50 micro-arcseconds.
MOJAVE (Monitoring Of Jets in Active galactic nuclei with VLBA Experiments) is a long-term program to monitor radio brightness and polarization variations in jets associated with active galaxies visible in the northern sky. The observations are made with the Very Long Baseline Array, which enables us to make full polarization images with an angular resolution better than 1 milliarcsecond (the apparent separation of your car’s headlights, as seen by an astronaut on the Moon). We are using these data to better understand the complex evolution and magnetic field structures of jets on light-year scales, close to where they originate in the active nucleus, and how this activity is correlated with a high energy electromagnetic and neutrino emission.
MuSES, which stands for Multi-messenger Studies of Energetic Sources, is a pioneering initiative in astrophysics. It is dedicated to the study of Active Galactic Nuclei, which are among the most powerful particle accelerators known in the cosmos. These celestial bodies harness the gravitational energy of matter accreted by supermassive black holes and convert it into electromagnetic and kinetic energy, resulting in the production of highly relativistic electrons and protons. The acceleration of protons and its relation to neutrino production is not well understood, posing a formidable challenge to researchers. MuSES aims to address these fundamental questions by exploiting recent advances in multi-messenger astronomy.
The MuSES project has received funding from the European Union (ERC grant agreement No 101142396). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or ERCEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Orginial Paper
Y. Y. Kovalev, A. B. Pushkarev, J. L. Gomez, D. C. Homan, M. L. Lister, J. D. Livingston, I. N. Pashchenko, A. V. Plavin, T. Savolainen, S. V. Troitsky: Looking into the Jet Cone of the Neutrino-Associated Very High Energy Blazar PKS 1424+240, A&A Letters, August 12, 2025 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202555400)