When the universe was a new billion years old, a galaxy spewed out a huge, fast-moving jet and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, the ray is visible to humans in the form of a jacket. The jet was recently photographed and analyzed by a team of Italian astronomers. Their findings, which give an idea of the length and velocity of the jet, were recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Viewed by the Very long baseline range—A formation of ten radio telescope antennas extending from St. Croix in the Atlantic Ocean to the Mauna Kea in the Pacific Ocean of Hawaii; the jacket looks like a galactic smear of tomato sauce on the cosmic lens. What is actually captured in the false-colored image, however, is a bright orange ray of plasma that is aimed at us approximately and extends for about 1600 light-years, a distance that defies every earthly 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 jackets as would be expected in the early universe.
“Under different scenarios, this mismatch may be due to the distant jackets having different characteristics than the local jacket population, such as the jet moving slower than what is happening locally,” Spingola wrote in an email. ‘This is what our findings suggest. If confirmed, we would have found that the local and distant jackets are different animals. ”
Such radiators are emitted from the centers of galaxies through supermassive black holes. The black holes contain slides of material around them, and sometimes shoot material at an extraordinary speed to the outside. These galactic centers, called active galactic nuclei, are all known as quasars; if the beams they emit are aimed at us, they are called jackets.
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A few years ago, blazars was found the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, transforming them from an object of intrigue into a compelling source of information about the early universe. The newly described jacket, named PSO J030947.49 + 271757.31 (mercifully abbreviated to PSO J0309 + 27), was only detected in March 2020 in the constellation Aries, about 12.8 billion light-years away from Earth. The jacket is the brightest in radio waves and the second brightest in X-rays among those of when the universe was younger than a billion years old. It is also the farthest galaxy of ours ever seen emitting such a ray, making it also the oldest jacket ever seen.
‘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, and therefore any new information is crucial to better understand that era.”
The team found the jacket beam was moving at a three-quarter speed of light; an extraordinary pace, though not the fastest, as other jackets were recorded at more than 90% of the light speed.
The beautiful stripe you see is actually an image made by integrating three different observations of the beam, taken at different radio frequencies, to elicit structures of the beam that are invisible on the other. The photo shows a jacket ray extending upwards in the empty black, with its brightest part downwards, where the core of the jacket lies.