IRAS 18293−0941

Now, here's the part that changes the tone of everything I just said.

IRAS 18293-0941 is approximately 12,000 light years away.

For reference, our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

By the time that jet reaches our neighborhood, it has dispersed, diffused, and been absorbed by intervening matter to the point where it poses no threat to Earth.

Now they have, and they can study the physics of particle acceleration at extreme scales using an object close enough for detailed observation.

you really might as well just leave the 401k on aggressive.

12,000 light years of distance means IRAS 18293-0941 is not the thing your retirement savings need to worry about.

There are plenty of other things, but not this.

This newly identified microblazer, first ever discovered in the Milky Way, is located about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Scutum.

It's cataloged as IRAS 18293-0941 and consists of a stellar-mass black hole with about 10 times the mass of our sun in a binary system with a spectral type Ob blue star orbiting each other approximately every 11 Earth days.

The jets are being produced by matter being sucked off the binary companion star onto the black hole.

First, the matter forms an accretion disk around the black hole, where it's crushed and torn apart, releasing huge amounts of energy.

Then, just before the remaining material crosses the event horizon to fall forever into the black hole's singularity, some of this material is picked up by magnetic fields on the accretion disk and then shot out into space perpendicular to the accretion disk, forming two superluminal jets, one on each side of the disk.

IRAS 18293-0941 was first cataloged back in 1983 by the Dutch-American IRAS satellite.

Astronomers' attention was drawn to the object because in many radio observations, it appeared to have a bright compact core and radio emissions coming out of one side only, the side facing the Earth.

And that was hinting at the possibility of a jet pointing directly towards the Earth.