Astronomers have discovered a truly ancient monster: a radio jet 200,000 light-years wide, originating from when the universe was less than 10% of its current age. Observed using the Gemini North and Hubble telescopes, astronomers are studying the jet to learn about how enormous black holes give off huge quantities of energy, and how they formed in the early universe.
The jet, called J1601+3102, has two points, or lobes, spreading out from a central point and covering a width twice the size of our entire galaxy. That makes this the largest radio jet ever seen in the early universe, and at its center is an object called a quasar: the very bright center of a galaxy, also called an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which contains a supermassive black hole at its heart.
“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,” explained lead researcher Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.
The researchers found that the jet was formed when the universe was less than 1.2 billion years old — and for reference, the universe is around 13.8 billion years old now. While you might think that you’d need a huge black hole to form a huge jet, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The black hole right in the center of this jet is on the smaller side compared to other quasars.
“Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars,” said Gloudemans. “This seems to indicate that you don’t necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early universe.”
Researchers aren’t sure why this relatively small black hole was able to produce such a huge jet, or why other similar black holes don’t create huge jets of their own. It’s also rare to see very large jets in the early universe, so they want to search for more information about when the earliest jets formed.
Even though it is huge, the recently discovered jet is an extremely long way away, so the researchers had to use data from ground-based telescopes and space-based telescopes to study it. “It’s only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away,” said Gloudemans. “This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths.”
The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
