Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that's shooting a giant energy beam directly at Earth. The cosmic juggernaut, which is about as massive as 700 million suns, is taking aim at us from a galaxy in the early universe, up to 800 million years after the Big Bang — making this the most distant "blazar" ever found.
Some supermassive black holes, known as quasars, are so massive they can superheat the material doom-spiraling within their accretion disk to hundreds of thousands of degrees, at which point they emit huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation. The quasars' immense magnetic fields can sculpt this energy into twin jets that shoot out perpendicularly to accretion disks and extend well beyond their host galaxies.
