A team led by UArizona astronomers will use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to examine three of the most distant active supermassive black holes known, as well as their host galaxies.
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Astronomers Discover By Far the Most Distant Known ‘Radio-Loud’ Quasar
Quasars are among the most extreme astrophysical objects in our universe. They contain supermassive black holes and lie at the centers of galaxies, where they quickly consume nearby materials and emit enormous amounts of energy.
A small percentage of quasars also drive powerful radio jets, which can travel at nearly the speed of light.
Now astronomers have discovered a quasar that is by far the most distant one with powerful jets.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of astronomers found the quasar, dubbed P172+18, about 13 billion light-years from Earth, according to a statement.
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Sputnik International
Science
NASA recently
revealed that astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the early universe with the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The source of this jet is a quasar i.e. a rapidly growing supermassive black hole – named PSO J352.4034-15.3373 (PJ352-15 for short) located at the centre of a young galaxy.
The image of this jet has been shared by NASA on its official NASA Chandra X-ray Instagram page. The caption for the image states that “the source of this 160,000-light-year-long jet is a rapidly growing supermassive #BlackHole, or quasar, located about 12.7 billion light years away from Earth. X-rays detected from the jet were emitted when the #Universe was only 0.98 billion years old less than 1/10 of the Universe s present age. This result could help explain how the biggest black holes formed at a very early time in the Universe s history”.