Giant Jets Bigger Than The Milky Way Seen Shooting From Black Hole
Its host galaxy is a quasar called J1601+3102, and we're seeing it as it was less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Spanning 215,000 light-years from end to end, this is the largest structure of its kind seen in those early stages of the Universe's formation, and astronomers think it can answer some questions about how they grow.
"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," explains astrophysicist Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab.
Jets are a particularly interesting supermassive black hole behavior. When there is enough material close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, it swirls around, forming a disk of material that feeds into the black hole, drawn in by its extreme gravity. That feeding often produces a quasar, blazing with light as the swirling material is heated by friction and gravity to temperatures of millions of degrees.
Not all the material falls onto the black hole beyond escape, though. Some of it gets diverted along the magnetic field lines outside the event horizon and accelerated to the black hole's poles, where it is launched into space with tremendous speed.
These eruptions of material form jets, and they blast out into space for huge distances. The longest we've found to date are 23 million light-years from end to end, much later in the lifetime of the Universe.
However, they only emit light in radio waves, which makes them a little tricky to see. To identify J1601+3102, Gloudemans and her colleagues had to combine observations from multiple telescopes, including the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope in Europe, Gemini North in Hawaii, and the optical Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas.
These observations didn't just reveal the extent of J1601+3102's jets, they allowed the researchers to study the black hole. The amount of light emitted by the quasar activity can be analyzed to reveal the black hole's mass.
It's just 450 million times the mass of the Sun, a relatively modest size for a quasar black hole. And it's not scarfing down matter at a particularly high rate, either. These properties suggest that quasars could be more varied than we generally assume.
"Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars," Gloudemans says. "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."
The discovery was detailed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Humanity Has Just Glimpsed Part of The Sun We've Never Seen Before
'City-Killer' Asteroid Even More Likely to Hit The Moon in 2032
The Center of Our Universe Does Not Exist. A Physicist Explains Why.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
New Zealand Air Force Mounts Dangerous Rescue Mission in Antarctica
The Royal New Zealand Air Force evacuated three people from a U.S. research base in Antarctica on Wednesday, conducting a rare and highly dangerous mission through volatile weather and 24-hour darkness to rescue the individuals. The evacuation at McMurdo Station, the United States' main outpost in Antarctica, was requested by the National Science Foundation after a staff member required urgent medical care and was unable to be treated there, the air force said in a statement. Two other people who needed medical care were also taken on the flight. The station, which typically hosts around 200 people during the winter months, has a small medical staff on site, similar to an urgent care facility, the National Science Foundation said in a statement. The foundation is not equipped, however, to handle major emergencies. It did not provide details about the medical conditions that led to the evacuations. On Tuesday afternoon, the air force sent a C-130J Hercules, a military transport aircraft, from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Antarctica. The crew, equipped with night vision goggles, flew about 2,400 miles, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to New York City, in difficult weather conditions and complete darkness, Andy Scott, an air commodore, said in the statement. Mr. Scott said that evacuating people from Antarctica during the winter months is one of the most challenging missions the air force can undertake. Temperatures can drop to minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly minus 70 Celsius) in some locations, and violent storms can appear in a matter of minutes. The journey is made even riskier because there is a point of no return, after which there are no airfields where the crew can divert the aircraft if something goes wrong, Mr. Scott said. The plane also needs to land in Antarctica on a runway made of ice, he added. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
2 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Battle of the Big Bang' Review: A Question of Origins
In the 1920s, scientists discovered that the universe was not static in size, as had previously been assumed, but was expanding in all directions. Galaxies were rushing away from one another as the very space between them was stretching. It was tempting, therefore, to imagine running the film backward into the past. The expansion, it seemed, must have started somewhere: at an infinitely hot, infinitely small and infinitely dense point from which everything exploded some 13.8 billion years ago. This origin became known as the big bang, and that infinitely small point at which it all began was called a singularity: a place where all the known laws of physics break down. Time was purportedly created only at the moment of banging, so it made no sense to ask what came before the big bang, just as it makes no sense to ask what is north of the North Pole. Why it happened at all remained an awkward question, but the existence of such an inscrutable singularity at the birth of all things became the mainstream view. It might be surprising, then, to learn that few experts in the field hold this view anymore. The traditional picture of the big bang is actually two separate ideas, explain Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper in 'Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.' Researchers continue to endorse the hot big bang, the idea of a primordial explosion of energy, but most do not think it goes back to 'a state of infinite density where time stands still and the answers to all our origin questions meet their demise.' Mr. Afshordi is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada; Mr. Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the creator of the YouTube series 'Before the Big Bang.' Their excellent book promises to map the 'quiet revolution' of 21st-century cosmology and introduce us to the revolutionaries. In very different ways, these rebels are all addressing questions left unanswered by the old theory. One is the origin-of-structure problem: The big bang ought to have spread energy homogeneously throughout space, but we observe clumps of galaxies with vast spaces between them, and measurements of the cosmic microwave background—the fossil radiation from when the universe was only 380,000 years old—reveal an unpredictable pattern of warm and cold spots. Nor have we ever seen an inflaton, a hypothetical particle that is supposed to have driven a period of enormous growth in the size of the early universe.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
James Webb Space Telescope revisits a classic Hubble image of over 2,500 galaxies
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The James Webb Space Telescope has returned to the scene of one of the Hubble Space Telescope's most iconic images, the Ultra Deep Field, to capture galaxies throughout cosmic history. This new image was taken as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), which is intent on further probing in infrared light two patches of sky that were originally imaged by Hubble: the Hubble Deep Field (1995) and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2004). The deep fields were Hubble's most intense stares into the universe, revealing the faintest galaxies at the highest redshifts that Hubble could see, galaxies that existed over 13 billion years ago and whose light has been traveling for all that time. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, in particular, was revisited several times by Hubble, in 2009, 2012 and 2014, using the near-infrared channels on the space telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. It shows some 10,000 galaxies detectable in an area of sky just 2.4 arcminutes square, which is less than a tenth of the diameter of the Full Moon in the night sky. However, Hubble can only see so far. At the greatest redshifts, corresponding to galaxies that we see as they existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, visible light is stretched into infrared wavelengths beyond Hubble's capacity to see. So, to beat this limitation, the JWST has stepped up. The giant 6.5-meter space telescope got its first good look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in October 2022 with its Near-Infrared Camera. It has revisited the Ultra Deep Field several times, as part of the JADES project, and this latest image was captured by the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS for short). Indeed, the instrument's shortest-wavelength filter (F560W, which detects infrared light from 4.9 to 6.4 microns, centered on 5.6 microns) took the longest exposure of any single filter as part of this image, totaling 41 hours. The image doesn't show the entirety of the Ultra Deep Field, only a section of it containing about 2,500 visible galaxies, four-fifths of them being truly distant, high redshift galaxies. None are record-breakers — the maximum redshifts visible are about 12, equating to 380 million years after the Big Bang, or 13.4 billion years ago. Just to compare, the current highest redshift galaxy, MoM-z14 (which is not part of the Ultra Deep Field), has a redshift of 14.4 and we see it as it existed about 280 million years after the Big Bang. When coupled with data from JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that operates at shorter wavelengths (1.9 to 4.8 microns), the observations reveal a great deal about the many galaxies in the image, most of which are visible as small dots of light. The image is presented in false color, since infrared light has no visible colors since it is beyond what the human eye can see. Hundreds of red galaxies in the image are either star-forming galaxies that are shrouded by interstellar dust that absorbs the starlight and re-radiates it in infrared, or are highly evolved galaxies with lots of older, redder stars that formed near the beginning of the universe. Meanwhile, the small greenish-white galaxies are those that are at very high redshift, meaning we see them as they exist mostly during the first billion years of cosmic history. On the other hand, the larger blue and cyan galaxies are closer with low-redshifts and so appear brighter to NIRCam than to MIRI. RELATED STORIES — James Webb Space Telescope eyes Hubble Ultra Deep Field in stunning detail (photo) — JWST peers through a cosmic lens in 'deepest gaze' to date | Space photo of the day for May 27, 2025 — Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes show 2 sides of star cluster duo | Space photo of the day for July 10, 2025 Astronomers work to push ever deeper with the JWST, adding observation on top of observations to chart the development of galaxies from close to the dawn of the universe to the present day. Among the data could be answers to many of cosmology's greatest secrets, such as how supermassive black holes formed, how galaxies formed, and when the majority of stars in the universe came into being. This is all still a work in progress, so stay tuned! A study of the JWST Ultra Deep Field observations as published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Solve the daily Crossword
