Astronomers at NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory have discovered the jet of a supermassive black hole being illuminated by the oldest light in the universe, evidencing that black holes with powerful jets may have been more common throughout the first few billion years following the Big Bang than previously thought.
The light detected in the study was emitted when the universe was just 2.7 billion years old and at a point when the intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) remnant from the Big Bang was much more than it is today.
The jet was discovered in the system known as B3 0727+409 and has a length of approximately 300,000 light years. Although many long jets given off by supermassive black holes have been detected nearby before, the nature of these emissions has remained a mystery. In the current study, the emissions in B3 0727+409 appear to be bolstered from CMB to X-ray wavelengths.
"Because we're seeing this jet when the universe was less than three billion years old, the jet is about 150 times brighter in X-rays than it would be in the nearby universe," Aurora Simionescu, who led the study, said in a press release.
The electrons present in the jet exit the black hole at almost the speed of light, making their way through the CMB radiation and colliding with microwave photons, which in turn boosts the energy of the photons up into the X-ray band that was caught by Chandra. Although electrons in black hole jets are typically discovered using radio observations due to their radio wavelengths, this discovery is special due to the fact that so far, no radio signal has detected the jet.
"We essentially stumbled onto this remarkable jet because it happened to be in Chandra's field of view while we were observing something else," said coauthor Lukasz Stawarz.
The findings were published in the Jan. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
