How can you miss anything about an almost premature bright ray of glowing gas leaping from the core of a galaxy? This is possible if the galaxy is 12.8 billion light-years away.
Observations by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) of the National Science Foundation have now revealed previously unknown things about the intestines of the 13 billion year old galaxy PSO J0309 + 27. This galaxy is a blazar, basically a quasar for steroids. Its jet of superhot gas is directed towards the earth (but do not start preparing for the day of judgment – it is no danger to us). PSO J0309 + 27 is now the brightest radio emitting jacket seen so far in space, and it is seen in the image above as when the universe was less than a billion years old.
Now that your mind has blown sufficiently, the universe was only 7 percent of its current age when the jacket looked like that. A million years is nothing in cosmic terms. Blazers from this early time in the universe are rare, but the analysis of the blazar’s characteristics may shed light on why so few supposedly formed so far back in the depths of time.
‘There is little known about [about the] time when the universe was young and the first sources (including active galactic nuclei, AGNs) ionized their surrounding gas during the period called cosmic reionization, ”said astronomer Cristiana Spignola, who led a recent study in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Some theoretical models exist as to why jackets were so scarce at the beginning of the universe, and Spignola’s team was able to support them with new observations of PSO J0309 + 27.
Blazers are raised with fuel from the supermassive black hole in the galactic center, also known as an active galactic nucleus or AGN. Our own AGN is Sagittarius A * (Soft A *). The black hole inside a jacket takes even supermassive black holes to the extreme. As the jacket’s black hole star devours insides and other material spinning in its accumulator disk, the disk ignites heat and sends energy from everywhere imaginable into the electromagnetic spectrum into space. These include the radio waves released from the AGN of PSO J0309 + 27, which are as massive as a billion suns.
Radiations of energy are emitted on both sides of the AGN and actually distinguish AGNs from other black holes, so what we are seeing is the radiation from just one point of the core of this jacket. Since the jackets are distinguished by the way their radiation beams point straight to the earth, we are permeated by particles that have taken billions of years to reach us. However, the rays are thought to be transparent because high-energy photons escape earlier.
We do not have to fear the ray of this jacket and build underground shelters, but we must look forward to seeing the portal it offers to the budding universe.