Scientists discover largest black hole jet ever seen in the early universe — its twice as long as our galaxy

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Scientists discover largest ****** hole jet ever seen in the early universe — its twice as long as our galaxy

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An illustration of the largest radio jet ever seen in the early universe twice as long as the Milky Way. | Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick

Astronomers have detected the largest ****** hole-launched jet ever seen in the early universe.

The twin-lobed jet that existed when the universe was just 1.2 billion years old stretches out for an incredible 200,000 light-years at the very least, making it twice as long as the width of the

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Even more surprisingly, the

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that powers the quasar from which this jet erupts, designated J1601+3102, is relatively small. (For a quasar-powering

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, that is. It still has a mass equivalent to 450 million suns).

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Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick

“Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme ****** hole mass compared to other quasars,” Anniek Gloudemans, team leader and a researcher at NOIRLab, said in a statement. “This seems to indicate that you don’t necessarily need an exceptionally massive ****** hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early universe.”

Painting a picture of early supermassive ****** hole jets

Though all large galaxies are thought to have a central supermassive ****** hole with a mass millions or even billions of times that of the sun, not all of these cosmic titans power

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Quasars are formed when supermassive ****** holes are surrounded by a wealth of gas and dust upon which they can feed. This material generates a flattened, swirling cloud of gas and dust called an accretion disk around the ****** hole. The tremendous mass of the supermassive ****** hole generates tidal forces and immense friction in the accretion disk that superheats it and causes it to glow brightly.

Not all of the material in an accretion disk is fed into the central ****** hole; some is channeled to its poles by powerful magnetic fields. These particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and are blasted out from both poles as highly collimated twin jets.

These jets can be seen at great distances by radio telescopes and are a common sight in the local universe. Thus far, however, they’ve been somewhat elusive in the early universe when the

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was less than 10% of its current age.

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An illustration of a supermassive ****** hole in the early cosmos blasting out relativistic jets. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)

The jet erupting from J1601+3102 was first observed by the international

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(LOFAR) Telescope, a network of radio telescopes based across Europe.

This detection was followed up on by the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS), while the Hobby Eberly Telescope attempted to observe it in visible light.

“We were searching for quasars with strong radio jets in the early universe, which helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies,” Gloudemans said. “It’s only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away.

“This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths.”

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The largest radio jet ever found in the early universe as seen by an array of telescopes. | Credit: LOFAR/DECaLS/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/F. Sweijen (Durham University) Image processing: M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

One key aim of these follow-up observations was to determine the characteristics of this quasar and the supermassive ****** hole that powers it.

Thus far, the team has been able to determine that the ****** hole has a mass of 450 million solar masses, but they also hope to learn the rate at which it is swallowing, or accreting, matter.

The team also found that the jets aren’t quite twins. Not only is one shorter than the other, but one jet lobe is brighter than its counterpart. This could indicate that an

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affects its jets.

Related Stories:

— NASA X-ray telescope Chandra discovers ****** holes ‘blow’ on their food to cool it down

— Supermassive ****** holes in ‘little red dot’ galaxies are 1,000 times larger than they should be, and astronomers don’t know why

— Scientists discover ****** holes spinning unexpectedly fast: ‘You’re essentially looking at its fossil record’

“When we started looking at this object, we were expecting the southern jet to just be an unrelated nearby source and for most of it to be small. That made it quite surprising when the LOFAR image revealed large, detailed radio structures,” team member Frits Sweijen from Durham University said. “The nature of this distant source makes it difficult to detect at higher radio frequencies, demonstrating the power of LOFAR on its own and its synergies with other instruments.”

The team’s research was published on Thursday (Feb. 6) in

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#Scientists #discover #largest #****** #hole #jet #early #universe #long #galaxy

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