Astronomers have made an exciting discovery—a massive radio jet stretching 200,000 light-years across from a distant quasar.
This is the largest radio jet ever found in the early universe, and it provides valuable clues about how galaxies and black holes evolved in the first billion years after the Big Bang.
What are radio jets and quasars?
Scientists know that most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers.
These black holes pull in gas and dust, creating a glowing core called a quasar. Some quasars launch powerful jets of energetic matter, which can be seen using radio telescopes.
While such radio jets are common in galaxies near us, they have been difficult to find in the early universe—until now.
A team of astronomers used the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of radio telescopes across Europe, to detect this enormous radio jet.
It is twice as wide as the Milky Way and was created by a quasar called J1601+3102. This quasar existed when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, just 9% of its current age.
To study the quasar further, the researchers used the Gemini North telescope and the Hobby Eberly Telescope to capture images in near-infrared and optical light. These observations helped them understand the quasar’s size, brightness, and the environment shaping its jets.
Quasars are known for their immense size, sometimes containing black holes billions of times heavier than our Sun. However, J1601+3102 is relatively small, with a black hole weighing only 450 million times the mass of the Sun. Despite this, it still produces an extremely powerful and asymmetrical double-sided radio jet.
“This quasar shows that you don’t need an unusually massive black hole to create such huge jets,” says Anniek Gloudemans, a postdoctoral research fellow at NOIRLab and lead author of the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Why was this jet so hard to find?
In the early universe, the entire sky was filled with radiation left over from the Big Bang, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This radiation acts like a fog, dimming the signals from distant radio jets. Until now, astronomers thought this might explain why large jets hadn’t been seen in early quasars.
However, the radio jet from J1601+3102 is so extreme and bright that it was able to shine through the cosmic fog, making it visible even from billions of light-years away.
“We originally thought part of this jet might be just a nearby object,” says Frits Sweijen, an astronomer at Durham University and co-author of the study. “It was a big surprise when LOFAR revealed such a large and detailed structure.”
Despite this discovery, many mysteries remain. Scientists still don’t fully understand what conditions lead to the formation of powerful radio jets or when the first jets in the universe appeared.
By combining the strengths of radio telescopes like LOFAR and optical/infrared observatories like Gemini North, researchers are uncovering more secrets about the earliest galaxies and black holes.
“This discovery brings us one step closer to understanding how black holes shaped the young universe,” says Gloudemans.
With more powerful telescopes being built, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Square Kilometre Array, scientists hope to find even more of these massive radio jets and unlock the hidden history of our universe.
Source: KSR.
