Astronomers have discovered the most remote source of radio emission ever known – 13 billion light-years away

Using the European Southern Observatories Very large telescope (ESO‘s VLT) astronomers have discovered and studied the most distant source of radio emission to date. The source is a ‘radio-loud’ quasar – a bright object with powerful jets radiating at radio wavelengths – that is so far away that it took 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early universe.

Quasars are very bright objects that lie in the center of some galaxies and are driven by supermassive black holes. Like the black hole consumes the surrounding gas, energy is released, enabling astronomers to spot it, even if they are very far away.

The newly discovered quasar, nicknamed P172 + 18, is so far away that light traveled about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as when the universe was only about 780 million years old. Although more quasars have been discovered, this is the first time that astronomers have been able to identify the earlier signatures of radio rays in a quasar in the history of the universe. Only about 10% of the quasars – which astronomers classify as ‘radio loud’ – have radiators that shine brightly on radio frequencies.^[1]

P172 + 18 is driven by a black hole that is about 300 million times more massive than our sun, which consumes gas at an incredible rate. “The black hole eats up matter rapidly and grows in mass at one of the highest rates ever observed,” explains astronomer Chiara Mazzucchelli, a fellow at ESO in Chile, who co-led the discovery with Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. has. in Germany.

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered and studied the most distant source of radio emissions to date. The source is a ‘radio-loud’ quasar – a bright object with powerful rays radiating at radio wavelengths – that is so far away that light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. This video summarizes the discovery. Credit: ESO

The astronomers think that there is a connection between the rapid growth of supermassive black holes and the powerful radio rays seen in quasars such as P172 + 18. It is suspected that the jets could disturb the gas around the black hole, which could increase the rate at which gas falls. Study of radio-hard quasars can provide important insights into how black holes in the early universe grew to their supermassive sizes. fast to the Big explosion.

“I find it very exciting to discover ‘new’ black holes for the first time and to offer another building block to understand the primeval universe, where we come from, and ultimately ourselves,” says Mazzucchelli.

P172 + 18 was first recognized as a distant quasar, after being identified earlier as a radio source, at the Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile by Bañados and Mazzucchelli. “Once we got the data, we examined it with an eye, and we knew right away that we had discovered the most remote radio hard quasar known so far,” says Bañados.

However, due to a short observation time, the team did not have enough data to study the object in detail. A flood of observations with other telescopes followed, including the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s VLT, which enabled them to delve deeper into the properties of this quasar, including determining key properties such as the mass of the black hole and how fast it eats. matter builds up from its environment. Other telescopes that contributed to the study include the Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Keck Telescope in the USA.

This video series starts from a wide view of the sky around P172 + 18 and ends at the very distant quasar, a bright object lying in the center of a distant galaxy and propelled by a supermassive black hole. The galaxy itself is surrounded by a very large bubble of ionized gas; artists’ impressions of both the bubble and the galaxy are seen in order. The final view is an artist’s impression of the quasar and its radio emitters. Credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser / L. Calçada / Digitized Sky Survey 2 / N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)

While the team is excited about their discovery, they should appear in The Astrophysical Journal, they believe that this radio-hard quasar is the first of many that can be found, perhaps at even greater cosmological distances. “This discovery makes me optimistic and I believe – and hope – that the distance record will be broken soon,” said Bañados.

Observations with facilities such as ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, and with the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) of ESO can help uncover and study more of these objects of the universe in detail.

Notes

[1] Radio waves used in astronomy have frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz.

More information

This research is presented in the paper “The discovery of a highly accreting, radio-loud quasar at z = 6.82” to in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team consists of Eduardo Bañados (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) [MPIA], Germany, and The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Science, USA, Chiara Mazzucchelli (European Southern Observatory, Chile), Emmanuel Momjian (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) [NRAO], USA), Anna-Christina Eilers (MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, USA), Feige Wang (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, USA), Jan-Torge Schindler (MPIA), Thomas Connor (Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL], California Institute of Technology, USA), Irham Taufik Andika (MPIA and the International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy & Cosmic Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany), Aaron J. Barth (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine , USA), Chris Carilli (NRAO and Astrophysics Group, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK), Frederick Davies (MPIA), Roberto Decarli (INAF Bologna – Astrophysics Observatory and Space Science, Italy), Xiaohui Fan (Steward Observatory ), University of Arizona, USA), Emanuele Paolo Farina (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany), Joseph F. Hennawi (Department of Physics, Broida Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA), Antonio Pensabene (Dipartimento di Physics and Astronomy, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Italy and INAF Bologna), Daniel Stern (JPL), Bram P. Venemans (MPIA), Lukas Wenzl (Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, USA and MPIA) and Ji nyi Yang (Steward Obs ervatory, University of Arizona, USA).