Tour: NASA's Chandra Sees Surprisingly Strong Black Hole Jet at Cosmic "Noon"
(Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart)
[Runtime: 03:03]

With closed-captions (at YouTube)

A black hole has blasted out a surprisingly powerful jet in the distant universe, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This jet exists early enough in the cosmos that it is being illuminated by the leftover glow from the big bang itself.

Astronomers used Chandra and the Very Large Array, a array of radio dishes in New Mexico, to study this black hole and its jet. They are seeing this black hole at a period they call “cosmic noon,” which occurred about three billion years after the universe began. During this time most galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time during the history of the universe.

Scientists are hoping to use this jet to probe questions about how black holes helped shape their surroundings during this critical era in cosmic history. They are finding that some black holes may carry a bigger punch at this stage in the universe than they thought.

The researchers identified and then confirmed the existence of two different black holes with jets over 300,000 light-years long. The two black holes are 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away from Earth respectively. The team discovered that one of the jets is remarkably powerful, because they found it carries roughly half as much energy as the intense light from hot gas orbiting the black hole.

Only Chandra could detect these very distant black holes because they are very close together on the sky. Even then, Chandra needed the photons to be boosted by the leftover glow from the Big Bang — known as the cosmic microwave background — to get a signal.

As the electrons in the jets fly from the black holes, they move through the sea of cosmic microwave background radiation and collide with microwave photons. The cosmic microwave background was much denser in the very early Universe than it is now. These collisions boost the energy of the photons up into the X-ray band to be detected by Chandra.

By combining the X-ray and radio data, the researchers calculated that the particles in the jets are moving at between 95% and 99% of the speed of light for one jet and between 92% and 98% of the speed of light for the other. The researchers were also able to measure the magnetic fields of these jets, providing more clues about the nature of these very distant and very powerful black hole jets.

Quick Look: NASA's Chandra Sees Surprisingly Strong Black Hole Jet at Cosmic "Noon"
(Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart)
[Runtime: 00:46]

With narration (video above with voiceover)

A black hole is blasting out a powerful jet just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

We can only see this jet because its particles boost the Big Bang’s leftover glow.

NASA’s Chandra and NSF’s Very Large Array joined together to make this discovery.

This jet allows astronomers to probe how black holes affect the young Universe.