Astronomers have discovered the largest jet ever observed in the early Universe. Its length is twice the diameter of the Milky Way.
We know that the centers of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes. Contrary to popular misconception, they don’t absorb absolutely all the matter in their vicinity. Part is ejected as polar jets consisting of plasma moving at near-light speed.
In our local Universe, such structures are not uncommon, but in the distant, early Universe they remained elusive until recently. This is due to the presence of the cosmic microwave background — the “fog” of relic radiation left over from the Big Bang. It weakens the radio emission of jets, making them much more difficult to detect.
Now that’s changed. Using installed on the telescope Gemini North spectrograph GNIRS, as well as a network of LOFAR radio telescopes located in Europe, astronomers were able to detect a rare two-sided jet, which existed when the age of the Universe was less than 1.2 billion years — only 9% of the present. It spans 200,000 light-years. That’s twice the width of our Milky Way.
The source of the jet is a galaxy with an extremely active black hole (quasar) at its center, designated J1601+3102. Although quasars can have masses billions of times that of the sun, this quasar is relatively small. The mass of J1601+3102 is “only” 450 million times the mass of the Sun. The jets formed by it are asymmetric both in brightness and length. This indicates that they may be influenced by the environment.
According to the researchers, the fact that the black hole forming jets has a noticeably smaller mass than other quasars, suggests that this factor is not decisive in their formation. The discovery has important implications for better understanding the timing and mechanisms of the formation of the first large-scale jets in our Universe and how they affect the evolution of galaxies.
According to NOIRLab
