10,000 billion times the power of the sun, this jet of black hole is incredible
Illustration of J1610, a quasar emitting an extremely powerful jet of light. In medallion, the image obtained in X -rays by Chandra. © NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
This image comes from cosmic dawn, only 3 billion years after the Big Bang. It is a quasar expelling a jet of matter and light of incredible power, measured at around 10,000 billion times the brightness of the sun. The quasars are very voracious supermassive black holes housed in the heart of distant galaxies.
These jets spring between 92 and 99 % of the speed of light
Thanks to the Chandra Spatial Telescope of NASA, an observatory specializing in x -ray imaging, astronomers discovered not one, but two black holes located at 11.6 and 11.7 billion years in the past – a consequence of the relatively low speed of light in front of these colossal distances. Their jet of material and light extends over more than 300,000 light years, about three times the diameter of the whole Milky Way!
Image with X-rays of J1610-1811, a quasar with a particularly powerful jet. © X -ray: NASA/CXC/CFA/J. Maithil et al. ; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
These overpowered jets are lit by the Big Bang embers!
At this age of the universe, the intense heat born of the Big Bang was more lively, since the expansion had not dilated the space as much as nowadays. In this jet, the electrons that escape from the environment of giant black holes, without of course never fallen under their horizon, from which nothing can escape, strike and collide with microwave photons Cosmological diffuse backgroundthe Big Bang bullshit. These incredibly powerful and immense jets are neither more nor less than in the cosmological diffuse background! Their speed is also quite remarkable: between 92 % and 99 % of the speed of light in the void.
A discovery in a crucial era of the universe: cosmic dawn
“These quasars are like cosmic time capsulessaid Jaya Maithil, postdoctoral research manager at the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics of Harvard. If we understand them, we can understand how they have an impact on the growth of their galaxy and the environment in which they resided. ”
This discovery is important, because cosmic dawn remains a crucial period of the history of the universe, where the black supermassive holes and their galaxies increased at a speed and according to a rate that we no longer know in our time.
These two quasars are in the direction of the constellation of Ophiuchus (the snake) and required about 24 hours of observation. The data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) were also used for this observation.
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