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An international team of researchers have stared down the barrel of one of the most violently energetic objects in the universe - and they didn't blink. Instead, they've figured out the physics behind one of the most impressive astrophysical events in existence

BL Lacertae is a blazar, a supermassive galactic-core black hole emitting vast and variable beams of energy

The English language simply lacks the ability to get across the staggering scale of these events

The most famous property of black holes is the event horizon, the "point of no return" beyond which you cannot escape. But even before this final barrier you're still close to a gigantic gravitational well built out of most of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - if not a point of no return, it's still a "point of incredibly difficult to escape from". We observe vast, super-energetic near-light speed particle streams from the poles of some such systems - what gives them the power?