Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood. In pursuit of understanding these celestial bodies, astronomers have stumbled upon a supermassive black hole, located a whopping 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, and it’s doing something pretty spectacular. The “blazar” is firing a super-powerful beam of energy straight towards us.
The energy beam from this black hole has travelled to us, just over 100 million years after the Big Bang took place — setting a new record for the distance from which we’ve observed such a phenomenon. The discovery also raises questions about how supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the Universe’s infancy.
Named J0410-0139, the black hole has a mass of about 700 million Suns and is one of the oldest of its kind that scientists have ever observed. Detected using data from several telescopes, including NASA’s Chandra Observatory and Chile’s Very Large Telescope, the black hole has provided a new peek into the early universe.
“The alignment of J0410-0139’s jet with our line of sight allows astronomers to peer directly into the heart of this cosmic powerhouse. This blazar offers a unique laboratory to study the interplay between jets, black holes, and their environments during one of the Universe’s most transformative epochs,” said Dr Emmanuel Momjian, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, associated with the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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What is a blazar?
The universe is full of powerful supermassive black holes that create powerful jets of high-energy particles, creating sources of extreme brightness in the vastness of space. When one of those jets points directly at Earth, scientists call the black hole system a blazar, as per NASA.
The jets extending from these blazars can extend millions of light-years in length. They are exceedingly bright because as particles approach the speed of light, they give off a tremendous amount of energy and behave in weird ways that Albert Einstein predicted.
Up until now, a little less than 3,000 blazars have been discovered but most are located closer to Earth than J0410-0139. Despite decades of study, scientists still don’t fully grasp the physical processes that shape the dynamics and emission of blazar jets.
