Galaxy is actually active black hole pointed DIRECTLY at Earth

An object previously believed to be a radio galaxy is actually an active black hole that has changed angles to point directly at Earth, new research suggests.

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that absolutely nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape its event horizon.

PBC J2333.9-2343, a large galaxy about 4 million light-years away, was previously classified as a radio galaxy, meaning its active galactic nuclei (AGN)’s gargantuan jets of radiation were pointed perpendicular to Earth´s line of sight. But new research published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reclassifies the galaxy as a blazar, meaning the black hole’s jets are now pointed directly at Earth. This means the galaxy’s jets shifted by a “dramatic” degree, the researchers wrote in the study.

“Our hypothesis was that the relativistic jet of its supermassive black hole had changed its direction, and to confirm that idea we had to carry out a lot of observations,” lead study author Lorena Hernández-García an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, said in a statement.

What caused this great shift? Astronomers are still working that out. Theories include a galaxy merger might have occurred—where another large galaxy collided with PBC J2333.9-2343—jostling the orientation of everything within it. More observations are needed to figure out this mystery.

An active galactic nucleus, or AGN, is an extremely bright central region of a galaxy that is dominated by the light emitted by dust and gas as it falls into a black hole.

Blazars, a type of galaxy powered by a ginormous black hole and among the brightest, most energetic objects in the sky, are not unfamiliar to science. Many thousands of them have been identified.

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