With the help of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered a record long jet of particles emanating from a supermassive black hole in the early universe. The discovery is reported in an article accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The study is summarized in a press release at Phys.org.
The object is located at a distance of 12.7 billion light years from Earth. The source of the jet, or jet, is a quasar, which is a rapidly growing supermassive black hole PSO J352.4034-15.3373 (PJ352-15), which is located in the center of a young galaxy. Its mass exceeds the mass of the Sun by a billion times.
Scientists observed PJ352-15 for a total of three days to detect X-rays about 160,000 light-years from the quasar. It is larger than the diameter of the Milky Way, which is about one hundred thousand light-years old. So far, the longest jet from a quasar has been only about five thousand light-years long. In addition, PJ352-15 breaks another record, as it is about 300 million light years farther than the farthest X-ray jet recorded before it.
The light detected from this jet was emitted when the universe was only 0.98 billion years old. In those days, the intensity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the Big Bang was much greater than it is today.
The electrons in the jet move at a speed close to the speed of light. When they collide with the photons that make up the CMB, the energy of the photons rises to the X-ray range, which can be detected with Chandra. In this scenario, the brightness of X-rays is significantly higher than that of radio waves, which is confirmed by observations.
