Astronomers was just 1.2 billion years old, about 9% of its current age. The jet stretches an astonishing 200,000 light-years across, twice the width of Milky Way Galaxy . It is the largest black hole jet ever observed from such an early cosmic era.
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Decades of observations have shown that black holes at the centers of galaxies attract nearby gas and dust, forming a swirling disk around them. As this material falls into the black hole, the friction created releases enormous amounts of energy. This process causes some of the material to be ejected in the form of powerful jets. Although radio telescopes have detected hundreds of such jets, some extremely large, none have been recorded in the distant, early universe.
The newly discovered jet erupts from both sides of an actively feeding black hole, known as quasar J1601+3102. This quasar, with a mass 450 million times that of the Sun, is located at the center of a galaxy about 10 to 13 billion light-years from Earth.
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The quasar was discovered in 2022 by a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands, part of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). This landmark discovery, led by Anniek Gloudemans, revealed that this quasar far outshines its host galaxy — so bright, in fact, that it emerged as the brightest among nearly two dozen similar objects studied by LOFAR.
This piqued Gloudemans' interest, prompting her and her team to pursue more extensive observations. This time, the researchers used all 51 LOFAR antennas across Europe, essentially creating a continental-scale radio telescope. The result was a 20-fold improvement in the detail of the observations compared to previous studies.
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The image of the jet produced by the black hole was crucial in confirming its size, according to the new study published February 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Source: livescience
