Telescopes spot monster radio jet streaming from ancient quasar
The Brief
A monster jet of radio waves was discovered by astronomers.
It's double the width of our Milky Way galaxy and the jet is shooting out of a quasar.
The quasar formed when the universe was about 1.2 billion years old.
LOS ANGELES - Telescopes worldwide have spotted a monster radio jet shooting out from a quasar that dates back to the first billion years of the universe.
The jet of radio waves is double the width of our Milky Way galaxy and is the biggest ever detected so early in the universe's history, astronomers said on Thursday.
Dig deeper
Radio jets like this are not uncommon in our cosmic neighborhood. But they've been elusive in the distant early universe — until now — because of the obscuring cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.
RELATED: 'Heartbeat' radio signal detected billions of light-years from Earth
What they're saying
"It's only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it's really far away," lead author Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation's NoirLab said in a statement.
The backstory
A quasar is formed when dust and gas fall into a black hole and let out enormous amounts of energy due to friction, according to NoirLab.
The result is a luminous galactic core called a quasar which can expel jets of energetic matter.
The quasar involved in this study, J1601+3102, is relatively small, researchers said. It weighs about 450 million times the mass of our sun.
The double-sided radio wave that is being shot out from the quasar is estimated to be at least 200,000 light-years across. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
The Source
Information for this article was gathered from The Associated Press and NoirLab. This story was reported from Los Angeles.
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