Astronomers find most distant quasar shooting powerful radio jets
A quasar from the early universe is the most distant found to date that’s shooting out powerful radio jets. Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently discovered the quasar, called P172+18, which is so far away that it takes about 13 billion years for the light from this quasar to reach Earth, where we observe the object as it was when the universe was just 780 million years old. While the new find is not the most distant quasar ever detected, it appears to be the most distant radioloud quasar, or radio jet-emitting quasar.
This quasar was first identified as a radio source when scientists using the Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile detected these powerful jets. “As soon as we got the data, we inspected it by eye, and we knew immediately that we had discovered the most distant radio-loud quasar known so far,” said Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who led this discovery alongside ESO astronomer Chiara Mazzucchelli.
The distant jet-shooting quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole that’s about 300 million times more massive than our Sun and is growing quickly, pulling in and swallowing surrounding matter with its immense gravity. The researchers think that there could be a connection between the quick growth of black holes like this and the jets that shoot out of radio-loud quasars like P172+18. These powerful jets might interact with nearby gases in a way that pushes the gases into the gravitational grip of these black holes, increasing how much gas falls into them.