How can you overlook anything about an almost preternatural bright gas jet coming out of the core of a galaxy? It is possible if this galaxy is 12.8 billion light-years away.
Observations from the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have revealed things that are hitherto unknown about the guts of the 13 billion-year-old PSO J0309 + 27 galaxy. This galaxy is a blazar, basically a steroid quasar. Its jet of superhot gas is directed at Earth (but don’t start preparing for the final judgment), it poses no danger to us. The PSO J0309 + 27 is now the brightest radio emitting blazar that has been seen away from space and is seen in the image above as it was when the universe was less than a billion years old.
Now that your mind has been blown enough, the universe was only 7 percent of its current age when the blazar looked like that. A billion years is nothing in cosmic terms. Blazars from this beginning of the universe are rare, but analyzing the properties of this blazar may illustrate why so few are supposed to have formed so far back in the depths of time.
“Little is known observationally [about the] time when the Universe was young and the first sources (including active galactic nuclei, AGN) ionized the gas around them during the period called cosmic reionization, “said astronomer Cristiana Spignola, who led a published study recently in Astronomy and astrophysics.
There are some theoretical models of why blazers were so rare at the dawn of the universe, and Spignola’s team was able to support them with new observations from OPS J0309 + 27.
Blazars receive fuel from the supermassive black hole in the galactic center, also known as the active galactic nucleus or AGN. Our own AGN is Sagittarius A * (Sag A *). The black hole of a blazar carries even supermassive black holes. As the black hole in the blazon devours the bowels of stars and other matter that revolve around the accretion disk, the disk ignites with heat and sends energy into space from anywhere imaginable to the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes the radio waves being released from the AGO of the PSO J0309 + 27, which is as massive as a billion suns.
The energy rays are discharged from both ends of the AGN and actually differentiate the AGNs from the other black holes, so what we are seeing is the single-end ray of the core of this blazar. Because blazars differ in the way their radiation beams point at the Earth, so they surround us with particles that have taken billions of years to reach us. However, jets are believed to be transparent because high-energy photons previously escaped.
Far from fearing the lightning of this blazar and building underground shelters, we should expect to see through the portal it offers to the nascent universe.