Gigantic jet spied from black hole in early universe

Date:
March 9, 2021
Source:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Summary:
Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long
jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the
early universe.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the early universe,
using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.


==========================================================================
If confirmed, it would be the most distant supermassive black hole
with a jet detected in X-rays. Coming from a galaxy about 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, the jet may help explain how the biggest black
holes formed at a very early time in the universe's history.

The source of the jet is a quasar -- a rapidly growing supermassive black
hole -- named PSO J352.4034-15.3373 (PJ352-15 for short), which sits at
the center of a young galaxy. It is one of the two most powerful quasars detected in radio waves in the first billion years after the big bang,
and is about a billion times more massive than the Sun.

How were supermassive black holes able to grow so quickly to reach such
an enormous mass in this early epoch of the universe? This is one of
the key questions in astronomy today.

Despite their powerful gravity and fearsome reputation, black holes do
not inevitably pull in everything that approaches close to them. Material orbiting around a black hole in a disk needs to lose speed and energy
before it can fall farther inwards to cross the so-called event horizon,
the point of no return.

Magnetic fields can cause a braking effect on the disk as they power a
jet, which is one key way for material in the disk to lose energy and, therefore, enhance the rate of growth of black holes.

"If a playground merry-go-round is moving too fast, it's hard for a child
to move towards the center, so someone or something needs to slow the ride down," said Thomas Connor of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who led the study. "Around supermassive black holes,
we think jets can take enough energy away so material can fall inward
and the black hole can grow." Astronomers needed to observe PJ352-15
for a total of three days using the sharp vision of Chandra to detect
evidence for the X-ray jet. X-ray emission was detected about 160,000 light-years away from the quasar along the same direction as much shorter
jets previously seen in radio waves by the Very Long Baseline Array. By comparison, the entire Milky Way spans about 100,000 light- years.

PJ352-15 breaks a couple of different astronomical records. First,
the longest jet previously observed from the first billion years after
the big bang was only about 5,000 light-years in length, corresponding
to the radio observations of PJ352-15. Second, PJ352-15 is about 300
million light-years farther away than the most distant X-ray jet recorded before it..

"The length of this jet is significant because it means that the
supermassive black hole powering it has been growing for a considerable
period of time," said co-author Eduardo Ban~ados of the Max Planck
Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. "This result
underscores how X-ray studies of distant quasars provide a critical
way to study the growth of the most distant supermassive black holes."
The light detected from this jet was emitted when the universe was only
0.98 billion years old, less than a tenth of its present age. At this
point, the intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation left
over from the big bang was much greater than it is today.

As the electrons in the jet fly away from the black hole at close to
the speed of light, they move through and collide with photons making
up the cosmic microwave background radiation, boosting the energy of
the photons up into the X-ray range to be detected by Chandra. In this scenario, the X-rays are significantly boosted in brightness compared
to radio waves. This agrees with the observation that the large X-ray
jet feature has no associated radio emission.

"Our result shows that X-ray observations can be one of the best ways to
study quasars with jets in the early Universe," said co-author Daniel
Stern, also of JPL. "Or to put it another way, X-ray observations in
the future may be the key to unlocking the secrets of our cosmic past." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Harvard-Smithsonian_Center_for_Astrophysics. Note: Content may be edited
for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Thomas Connor, Eduardo Ban~ados, Daniel Stern, Chris Carilli, Andrew
Fabian, Emmanuel Momjian, Sofi'a Rojas-Ruiz, Roberto
Decarli, Emanuele Paolo Farina, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Hannah
P. Earnshaw. Enhanced X-ray Emission from the Most Radio-Powerful
Quasar in the Universe's First Billion Years. he Astrophysical
Journal, 2021 [abstract] ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210309153500.htm

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