A team of astronomers has discovered giant X-rays from two supermassive black holes that formed when the Universe was only 3 billion years old. They are so bright that their light is equal to the radiance of 10 trillion suns.
The discovery was announced by Jaya Maithil of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on June 9 at the American Astronomical Society conference in Anchorage.
Using the Chandra telescope and the VLA, researchers saw that each beam extends for 300,000 light-years. That’s almost three times the diameter of the Milky Way. The rays emanate from quasars — galaxies with active black holes at their centers, located more than 11 billion light-years away.
One of Chandra’s images shows a purple line emanating from the core of quasar J1610+1811 — this is what the ray looks like. It is difficult to see because it is dimmer than the core itself.
“It’s like looking for candlelight next to a flashlight that’s shining in our direction,” Maithil compared.
Astronomers were able to detect the signals thanks to a unique mechanism: X-ray light is produced when rays interact with the cosmic microwave background — the residual heat from the Big Bang.
This discovery helps scientists understand how supermassive black holes formed and interacted with their surroundings in the early stages of the universe’s evolution. Astronomers believe that such rays could slow down or accelerate the growth of galaxies, influence the distribution of matter, and even regulate star formation.
“These quasars are like cosmic time capsules,” said Maithil. By studying them, we can learn what the first galaxies looked like and how their structure changed under the influence of black holes.
According to the researcher, the discovery of rays from black holes is one of the clearest proofs of the existence of such powerful phenomena in the early universe.
Researchers plan to continue their observations to understand the extent of this phenomenon and its role in shaping the modern cosmos.
