Supermassive black holes from early universe seen shooting jets as bright as 10 trillion suns

Astronomers have discovered an ancient black hole shooting an extremely powerful jet that carries light from the time of the Big Bang. The black hole formed just 3 billion years after the universe was born. The particles released by the jet are boosting the cosmic microwave background into powerful X-rays. The discovery was made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which detected not just one, but two black holes with jets from the early universe because of the faint afterglow they carry from the Big Bang. These black holes existed during "cosmic noon", a time when galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing at breakneck speed.

"They are transforming the first light of the universe into high-energy jets," Jaya Maithil, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and one of the authors of the study, said. The paper on the observations has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Maithil and her team took data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and discovered that each jet spans a whopping 300,000 light-years - that is, three times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. Each jet was observed emerging from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, known as a quasar. The two black holes are located around 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away. The two quasars are - J1610+1811 and J1405+0415.

The particles in the jet from J1610+1811 are travelling at 92 per cent to 98 per cent of the speed of light. The jet is so powerful that it is carrying roughly half as much energy as the intense light from hot gas orbiting the black hole. This output is staggering and equivalent to that from 10 trillion suns, the study states. Meanwhile, the second jet is moving at between 95 per cent and 99 per cent of the speed of light.

"These quasars are like cosmic time capsules," Maithil said. "If we understand them, we can understand how they were impacting the growth of their galaxy and the environment in which they resided."

The researchers explain in their paper what exactly is going on with the black holes and why Chandra was able to detect the speedy jets. The jets remain visible across billions of light-years because they are shining in X-rays due to the interactions with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the authors wrote. CMB is a faint relic radiation from the time of the Big Bang, which stayed after the universe cooled down to allow starlight to travel, ending the "cosmic dark ages."

When the jets formed, the CMB was denser and low-energy photons filled up space. The electrons in the jet raced and slammed into these photons, turning them into X-rays. The electrons in the jets "raced outward at near light speed, slammed into these CMB photons, boosting them into the X-ray range detectable by Chandra," according to the study.