The object, located in the Milky Way but behaving in the same way as the active nucleus of a young galaxy, caught the attention of scientists. Quasars are distant galaxies that are still forming. These are so bright objects in space that astronomers initially considered them stars and later called them “quasi-stellar objects.”

As modern science has revealed, their enormous energy is probably a manifestation of the activity of a supermassive black hole located at the center of any galaxy. Black holes are even suspected to be the core of globular star clusters.

Therefore, black holes in quasars often absorb matter so intensely that they cannot physically absorb everything they attract, and the excess is expelled from around their poles in the form of giant plasma jets, often accelerating up to the speed of light. These are called relativistic jets. And if the black hole is oriented in such a way that one of the jets hits the Earth, then the object turns out to be especially bright. Later it was called blazar: “hot quasar” (from the word flame – “to scare”).

Until recently, such an object was expected to be seen only somewhere far outside our Galaxy, but recently researchers have turned their attention to an interesting object specifically in the constellation Sagittarius – V4641 Sagittarius. According to estimates, it is approximately 20 thousand light years away from us. We will remind you that the center of the Milky Way is located 26,000 light years from the Earth and also in Streltka. That means the object is relatively close to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which contains the mass of four million suns.

But this object itself is not supermassive. It is only a few times heavier than the Sun, but it behaves like a real quasar: it ejects relativistic jets, and one of them is directed towards us, which means that it is not just a quasar, but a blazar. Scientists gave it this name

As it says in the magazine Nature A team of researchers from Poland, the USA, Mexico and other countries managed to determine that this is a black hole of about six solar masses that “swallows” a companion star. The system is very tight: One rotation around the general center of mass of the predator and its victim is completed in less than three Earth days.

It is worth noting that several dozen such microquasars have actually been observed in the Milky Way, but the photons from V4641 Sagittarii have a record high energy of up to 200 teraelectron volts. This is several times more than other sources. Astronomers conclude that much of the galactic radiation that constantly bombards the Earth comes from the microquasar phenomenon.