Astronomers discover ultrapowerful black hole jet as bright as 10 trillion suns lit by Big Bang’s afterglow– www.space.com
Astronomers have discovered extraordinarily powerful X-ray jets blasting from two supermassive black holes that are so ancient that the jets shine in the afterglow of the Big Bang.
“They are transforming the first light of the universe into high-energy jets,” Jaya Maithil, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told reporters Monday (June 9) at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), Maithil and her team found that each jet spans a whopping 300,000 light-years — nearly three times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. Each jet emerges from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, known as a quasar, located about 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away.