Astronomers have discovered the largest jet from a black hole ever recorded in the early Universe. It stretches 200 light-years across, more than twice the width of our Milky Way galaxy, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications. published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The jet's source is a quasar, an active galactic nucleus that emits a lot of light. This center of a system of stars and matter is formed when supermassive black holes are surrounded by a large amount of gas and dust that they can absorb.
This material creates a flattened, swirling cloud around the black hole, called an accretion disk. The object's enormous mass causes tidal forces and enormous friction in the disk, which, due to overheating, cause it to glow brightly.
However, not all of the accretion disk material falls into the central part of the black hole - some particles, due to powerful magnetic fields, move towards the poles. As a result, some of the dust and gas is accelerated to almost the speed of light and flies out of both poles in the form of jets.
They are thought to be common in the local universe, where astronomers observe the jets with radio telescopes. However, they have not yet been detected in the early universe, a period of time when the cosmos was less than 10% of its current age.
During the observation, scientists discovered that the largest radio stream comes from a relatively small black hole J1601+3102. Scientists believed that one of the prerequisites for the formation of quasars is a large mass.
"Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass, compared to other quasars. This seems to indicate that an extremely massive black hole or rapid accretion is not necessarily required to create such powerful jets in the early Universe," – says the lead author of the study, Annick Gloudemans from the National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in the USA.
Previously, scientists had not detected radio streams in the early Universe because of the darkened cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.
"It's only because this object is so extraordinary that we can observe it from Earth, even though it's very far away," – explained Annick Gloudemans.
Scientists estimate that the quasar that powers the jet formed during the first 1,2 billion years of the universe, which is 8% of its current age.
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