When the universe was about a billion years incipient, a galaxy launched into the cosmos a ray of radiation and plasma ginormous and fast. Nearly 13 billion years later, this ray is visible to humans in the form of a blaze. The jet has recently been captured and analyzed by a team of Italian astronomers. His findings, which give an idea of the length and speed of the jet, were recently published in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics.
Displayed through the Very long base matrix—A formation of 10 radio telescope antennas stretching from Santa Croix, in the Atlantic Ocean, to Mauna Kea in Hawaii, in the Pacific — the blazar looks like a galactic smear of tomato sauce in the cosmic lens. What is actually captured in the false-color image, however, is a bright orange plasma beam, which points us approximately and is about 1,600 light-years long, a distance that defies any terrestrial analogy.
According to Cristiana Spingola, an astronomer at the University of Bologna and lead author of the recent article, scientists do not see as many blazers as might be expected in the early universe.
“Between the different scenarios, this mismatch could be because distant blazars had different properties like the local blazar population, such as the jet moving slower than what happens locally,” Spingola wrote in an email. “This is what our findings suggest. If confirmed, we would have discovered that local and distant blazars are different beasts ”.
These jets are emitted from the centers of galaxies by supermassive black holes. Black holes accumulate discs of matter around them, sometimes ejecting material spouts outward at an extraordinary speed. These galactic centers, called active galactic nuclei, are all known as quasars; when the beams they expel are oriented towards us, they are called blazars.
G / O Media may receive a commission
A couple of years ago, blazars it was found to be the sources of cosmic rays of ultra high energy, transforming them from an object of intrigue into a source of convincing information about the primitive universe. First detected in March 2020, the recently described blazer, called PSO J030947.49 + 271757.31 (mercifully shortened to PSO J0309 + 27), is located in the constellation Aries, about 12.8 billion light-years from the Earth. Earth. The blazar is the brightest in radio waves and the second in X-rays among those from when the Universe was less than a billion years old. It is also the farthest galaxy in our history that has ever ejected a jet like this, making it the oldest blazar ever observed.
“These properties make it an ideal object to study [active galactic nuclei] at cosmological distances, “Spingola wrote.” We know very little about the young Universe, so any new information is crucial to a better understanding of this era. “
The team found that the jet blazar was moving at three-quarters of the speed of light; an extraordinary pace, though not the fastest, as other blazers have been recorded at over 90% of the speed of light.
The beautiful stripe you see is actually an image made by integrating three different lightning observations, taken at different radio frequencies, to cause lightning structures invisible to each other. All in all, the image shows a blazer beam extending upwards towards the hollow black, with its brightest section towards the bottom, where the core of the blazer is located.