The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has observed a powerful energy beam aimed straight at Earth, coming from a supermassive black hole called Markarian 421 – located in the Great Bear galaxy as seen from Earth.
Markarian 421 is a so-called "blazar," a supermassive black hole hundreds of thousands to millions of times heavier than Earth's Sun. A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.
The unimaginable forces that such an object exerts on the celestial bodies and other matter in its vicinity create a gigantic disk that orbits the black hole at lightning speed. If a black hole is large enough, some of the matter "falling" into the black hole can sometimes be "shot out" in huge jets of energy.
Such jets can sometimes shoot across the universe for up to millions of light years like some kind of enormous spotlight. A light-year is the distance light, which travels at a speed of almost 300,000 kilometres per second, travels in one year.
