rips through space from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Cen A (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/D. Bogensberger et al; Image
Processing:
NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk;) in close vicinity to a flashlight that's blazing toward us."
...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.
Video: click image...
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.
of a powerful jet launched by the quasar J1610+1811, located about 11.7 billion light-years from Earth. The jet is so ancient that it's being illuminated by the afterglow of the Big Bang. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/J. Maithil et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)
One of the newfound jets, from a quasar known as J1610+1811,
taken by Chandra X-Ray Observatory. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/J. Maithil et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss;
Image
Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)
What makes these jets particularly noteworthy is that they remain visible across billions of light-years.
In a paper (Investigating
the Emission Mechanism in the Spatially-resolved Jet of two z
\approx 3 radio-loud Quasars) accepted for publication in
The Astrophysical Journal, Maithil and her team suggested
that the jets shine in X-rays thanks to interactions with the
cosmic microwave background (CMB)
- the faint relic radiation from the Big Bang left over after the
universe cooled enough for starlight to travel freely for the first
time, marking the end of the "cosmic
dark ages."
As electrons in the jets raced outward at near
light speed, they slammed into these CMB photons, boosting them into
the X-ray range detectable by Chandra, according to the new study.
By combining Chandra's X-ray and VLA's radio data, the researchers calculated that particles in the J1405+0415 jet are traveling at 95% to 99% the speed of light.
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