Astronomers have discovered the most distant radio signal ever
Its source is a radio loud quasar blasting out jets when the universe was still in its infancy.
With assistance from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered the most distant radio emission ever recorded. The source is a quasar so distant that its light has been travelling 13 billion years to reach us. That means that it existed when the Universe was just 780 or so million years old.
This artist’s impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked. To date (early 2021), this is the most distant quasar with radio jets ever found and it was studied with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about 780 million years old. (ESO)
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Astronomers using the National Science Foundation s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have found and studied the most distant cosmic jet discovered so far a jet of material propelled to nearly the speed of light by the supermassive black hole in a quasar some 13 billion light-years from Earth. The quasar is seen as it was when the universe was only 780 million years old, and is providing scientists with valuable information about how galaxies evolved and supermassive black holes grew when the universe was that young.
The studies indicate that the quasar a galaxy harboring a black hole 300 million times more massive than the Sun has a jet of fast-moving particles only about 1,000 years old. While other quasars have been found at its distance and beyond, it is the first found at such a distance with the strong radio emission indicating an active jet. Only a small fraction of quasars have such jets.
Astronomers found the distant radio source with the Magellan Telescope in Chile
They then used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to study confirm it as a quasar
Named P172+18 the team say it provides information on the early universe
This is the most distant quasar ever discovered by astronomers dating to a point when the universe was just 780 million years old, study authors explained
Most distant cosmic jet discovered 13 billion light-years away
This artist’s impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked. To date (early 2021), this is the most distant quasar with radio jets ever found and it was studied with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about 780 million years old.
It has taken 13 billion years for the light from the powerful jets of a distant object to reach us.
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