When the universe was billions of years old, a galaxy he threw a rapid, fast-moving jet of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans as a blazer. The jet was recently imagined and analyzed by a team of Italian astronomers. Their findings, which give a sense of the length and speed of the jet, were recently published in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics.
Viewed by Very long base matrix– a formation of 10 radio telescope antennas stretching from the Holy Cross in the Atlantic Ocean to Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Pacific – the blazer looks like a galactic smear of tomato sauce on the cosmic lens. What is actually captured in the false color image, however, is a bright orange plasma jet, directed at us and stretching for a length of about 1,600 light-years, a distance that defies any terrestrial analogy.
According to Cristiana Spingola, an astronomer at the University of Bologna and lead author of the recent paper, scientists do not see as many blazers as would have been expected in the early universe.
“Among different scenarios, this mismatch could be caused by remote blazers that have different properties than the local blazer population, such as the jet moving slower than what happens locally,” Spingola wrote in an email. . “It simply came to our notice then. If it were confirmed, we would have discovered that the local and distant blazons are different beasts ”.
Such jets are emitted from the centers of galaxies by supermassive black holes. Black holes accumulate discs of matter around them, sometimes evacuating jets of material to the outside with extraordinary speed. These galactic centers, called active galactic nuclei, are known as quasars; when the beams he pulls are facing us, they are called blazers.
G / O Media may receive a commission
A few years ago, blazers were found to be cosmic ray sources with ultra-high energy, transforming them from an object of intrigue into a convincing source of information about the early universe. First discovered in March 2020, the recently described blazer, called PSO J030947.49 + 271757.31 (abbreviated to PSO J0309 + 27), is located in the constellation Aries, about 12.8 billion light-years away from Earth. The Blazar is the brightest in radio waves and the second in the light of X-rays among those when the Universe was less than a billion years old. It is also the most distant galaxy we have ever seen taking out such a jet, making it also the oldest blazar observed to date.
“These properties make it an ideal object to study [active galactic nuclei] at cosmological distances “, wrote Spingola. “We know very little about the young Universe, so any new information is crucial to a better understanding of that era.”
The team found that the blazer jet was moving at three-quarters the speed of light; an extraordinary rhythm, although not the fastest, because other blazes were recorded with over 90% light speed.
The beautiful girl you see is actually an image made by integrating three different observations of the jet, made at different radio frequencies, to obtain structures of the jet invisible on the others. However, the image shows a jet blazar extending upwards in bare black, with the brightest section towards the bottom, where the core of the blazar is.