After decades of astronomical observations, scientists know that most galaxies contain massive black holes in their centers. The gas and dust that fall in these black holes release a huge amount of energy such as result of friction, forming luminous galactic nuclei, called quasares which, in turn, expel jets of energy matter. These can be detected with radio telescopes at large distances. Finding them in the vicinity of our galaxy is usual, but until now they had remained elusive in the distant and early universe.
Now, thanks to a combination of telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Anniek Gludemans, has discovered a jet of distant radio that It extends for at least 200,000 light years, twice the width of the Milky Way. The findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This is the largest radio jet ever found at this early stage in the history of the universe. The jet was first identified using the International Telescope of Low Frequency Assembly (LOFO), a network of radio telescopes distributed throughout Europe.
Follow -up observations were also obtained in the near infrared spectrum with the nearby infrared spectrograph Gemini (Gnirs) and in the optical spectrum with the Hobby Eberly telescope to paint a complete image of the radius jet and the cuasar that produces it. These findings are crucial for more information about the moment and the mechanisms behind the formation of the first large -scale jets in our universe.
“We were looking for quasars with strong radio jets in the early universe, which It helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies”, Says Gloumes.
To understand its formation history it is necessary to determine the properties of quasar, such as its mass and the speed at which it consumes matter. To measure these parameters, The authors sought a specific wavelength of the light emitted by the quasars. Normally, this signal appears in the ultraviolet wavelength range. However, due to the expansion of the universe, which makes the light emitted by the quasar “stretch” to longer wavelengths.
The Cuásar, called J1601+3102, was formed when The universe was less than 1.2 billion years old, only 9% of its current age. While the quasars can have masses billions of times larger than that of our sun, this is quite small, since it weighs “barely” 450 million times the mass of the sun.
“Interestingly, the quasar that feeds this massive radius jet does not have an extreme black hole dough compared to other quasars -adds Gloudemans -. This seems to indicate that an exceptionally massive black hole is not necessarily needed to generate such powerful jets in the early universe”
Until now, the shortage of great radio jets in the early universe had been attributed to the noise of the cosmic microwave background, the fog Omnipresent from microwave radiation that remained of the big bang. This persistent background radiation normally decreases the radio light of these distant objects.
“It’s just because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, although it is really far -says Gloumes -. This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate in different wavelengths. When we start observing this object We expected the jet to simply be an unrelated close source And that, for the most part, was small. Therefore, it was quite surprising that the image revealed large and detailed radio structures. ”
Scientists still have a multitude of questions about how the bright quasars on radio such as J1601+3102 differ from other quasars. Still without being clear What circumstances are necessary to create such powerful radio jetsor when the first radio jets were formed in the universe. That is the next goal of scientists.