When the universe was a billion years old, a galaxy spewed ginormous jet, rapid transfer of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans in the form of a blazar. The jet was designed recently and studied by a team of Italian astronauts. Their findings, which give a sense of the length and distance of the pier, were recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astronomy.
Seen through Very long baseline ark– creation of 10 radio telescope antennas extending from St. Atlantic Ocean croix to Hawaii ‘s Mauna Kea in the Minch – the blazar looks like a galactic smear of tomato sauce on the cosmic lens. What was captured in the false color image, however, is a bright-orange jet of plasma, roughly marked on us and stretching around 1,600 light-years, a distance that goes against terrestrial symbolism. .
According to Cristiana Spingola, an astronomer at the University of Bologna and the paper’s recent lead author, scientists are not seeing as many fires as would be expected in the early universe.
“Among different scenarios, this imbalance could be due to the fact that the blazars have different properties in the distance due to the local blazar population, such as the jet moving slower than what happens to local, ”Spingola wrote in an email. “This is what our findings suggest. If proven, we would have found that the local and distant blazars are different animals. “
Such jets are emitted from the centers of galaxies with horrible black holes. The black holes collect discs of material around them, sometimes sending out jets of outside material at an astonishing speed. These galactic centers are called quasars, called active galactic nuclei; when the beams they emit are at us, they are called blazars.
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A couple of years ago, blazars was found to be ultra-high energy cosmic ray sources, transforming them from an interesting object into a solid source of information about the early universe. First discovered in March 2020, the recently described blazar is named PSO J030947.49 + 271757.31 (mercifully abbreviated to PSO J0309 + 27), located in the Aries constellation, around 12.8 billion light years away from Earth. The blazers are the brightest in radio waves and the second brightest in X-rays among those from when the Earth was younger than a billion years old. It is also the farthest galaxy we have ever seen launch such a jet, which also makes it the oldest blazar ever seen.
“These buildings make it a great place to study [active galactic nuclei] at cosmological distances, ”Spingola wrote. “We know very little about the young Universe, so any new information is crucial to a better understanding of that time.”
The team found that the jet blazar was moving at three-quarters of the speed of the light; amazing speed, though not the fastest speed, since other blazars are programmed at over 90% speed of light.
The beautiful streak you see is an image made by combining three different views of the pier, built at different radio frequencies, to make the structures of the pier visible on the others. All told, the image shows a jet blazar stretching up into the empty black, with its brightest segment toward the base, where the heart of the blazar lies.