Every so often a story turns up that is impossible to photograph, impossible to visit, and still worth putting on a hat. This is one of them. In the last week of September astronomers said that a faint object in our own galaxy, catalogued as IRAS 18293-0941, is the first confirmed microquasar inside the Milky Way — and more than that, a microblazar, meaning one of its two jets happens to be pointed very nearly along our line of sight.
There is exactly one design in this batch, because there was exactly one story on 27 September big enough to carry a hat on its own.
A black hole 12,000 light years away is aiming a beam almost straight at us
The system is about 12,000 light years off, which by galactic standards is the next street over. At the middle of it is a black hole of ordinary stellar mass — not one of the monsters that sit in the cores of galaxies, but the kind left behind when a big star collapses. It is locked in orbit with a companion star, going round once every 11.4 days, and it is pulling material off that star as it goes. Most of that material spirals in. Some of it never makes it, and gets flung back out of both poles at close to the speed of light.
That is a microquasar, and theorists have been predicting them for roughly thirty years. Astronomers had found plenty of the full-sized version — blazars powered by supermassive black holes in other galaxies — but never a confirmed small one at home. The reason is unglamorous: this one sits behind so much interstellar dust that it is effectively invisible to an optical telescope. It took a network of radio dishes to pick it out, and it had been hiding in plain sight in a catalogue the whole time.
What makes it a blazar rather than just a quasar is the geometry. Two jets, and one of them happens to be aimed nearly at Earth. Look down the barrel of a relativistic jet and everything about it brightens and sharpens; the gamma-ray photons coming out of this one carry something like ten times the energy of anything produced by the biggest particle collider ever built on Earth. A small dead star in our own galaxy is out-accelerating every machine we have.
The patch
The Carbon Fiber Black Hole Jet Trucker Hat — Milky Way does not try to draw a black hole, because nobody can. It draws the shape instead: a small bright disc with a flattened ring across it, and two narrow jets running out of the top and bottom on a diagonal — one long and needle-thin, the other short, blunt and ringed, because that is the one coming at you. The whole thing is die-cut to that outline, a slanted hourglass with a bar through it, in matte black carbon fiber. No lettering. It is the kind of design that works whether or not you have ever heard the word microblazar, which covers almost everybody.
Shop the Carbon Fiber Black Hole Jet Trucker Hat →
Six colorways, on the Richardson 112 and on the Infinity Charlie ponytail cap, in the Hot Off the Press collection with the rest of the daily drops.
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Cleveland's Orangutans Move Into a $60 Million House on 22 October
Cleveland's Orangutans Move Into a $60 Million House on 22 October