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| Artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole at “cosmic noon,” blasting a high-speed jet through the early universe.
💥 As electrons race through the dense cosmic microwave background, they energize light into the X-ray band—captured by NASA’s Chandra Observatory from 11.6 billion light-years away. |
A black hole in the distant universe has been caught blasting out an unexpectedly powerful jet—thanks to a little help from the Big Bang itself.
That’s the astonishing discovery from a new NASA study using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). The results, shared at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting, provide a stunning look back into an era known as “cosmic noon,” when the universe was just 3 billion years old and galaxies and black holes were growing at their fastest rates.
Piercing Through the Early Universe.
At a staggering 11.6 billion light-years away, this supermassive black hole sits at a time when the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the faint afterglow of the Big Bang—was far denser than it is today. This leftover light played a crucial role in helping scientists detect the jet.
Here’s how:
As high-speed electrons in the black hole’s jet fly through this thick sea of CMB radiation, they collide with CMB photons, giving them a major energy boost. These boosted photons shift into the X-ray range, where NASA’s Chandra telescope can spot them—even from across the cosmos.
Two Monster Jets, Racing Near Light Speed.
The team discovered two different black holes, each blasting out jets over 300,000 light-years long:
- J1405+0415, moving at 95–99% of the speed of light
- J1610+1811, moving at 92–98% of the speed of light
Incredibly, the jet from J1610+1811 carries about half as much energy as all the glowing gas swirling around the black hole—a sign of just how powerful these ancient jets were.
Seeing the Unseeable.
Normally, observing such distant jets would be a challenge. But thanks to the dense early CMB and Chandra’s sharp X-ray vision, scientists were able to detect these high-speed jets, even though they’re closely aligned with extremely bright quasars (the growing black holes themselves).
Cracking the Speed-Angle Mystery.
One of the biggest puzzles with quasar jets is telling how fast they’re moving and at what angle we’re viewing them. Due to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, jets pointed toward Earth appear much brighter than those angled away. This effect—called relativistic beaming—makes it tricky to know whether a jet is bright because it’s fast, or just because it’s pointed at us.
To solve this, the researchers developed a novel statistical method that corrects for this observational bias. They accounted for the fact that we’re more likely to spot jets pointed toward us, and then ran 10,000 simulations to estimate the most likely viewing angles:
- About 9° for J1405+0415
- About 11° for J1610+1811
Visualizing the Discovery.
An artist’s illustration helps bring this phenomenon to life.
At the center sits a black hole, appearing as a dark marble with a glowing yellow edge. A disk of swirling hot gas encircles it like a tilted plate, burning from orange to bright yellow as it spirals inward. Two powerful jets—one bright and one dimmer—shoot out in opposite directions, wrapped in corkscrewing lines like cosmic springs.
In a Chandra X-ray image inset, the jet is seen as a faint purple line extending from a glowing white ring. This line represents the X-ray photons boosted by the jet’s interaction with the CMB—evidence of energy transfers across billions of light-years and billions of years of cosmic history.
This work, led by Jaya Maithil of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, is a dramatic reminder of how even the faintest echoes from the Big Bang still shape what we see in the universe today.
The full study is being published in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available for those eager to dive deeper.