Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that's shooting a giant energy beam directly at Earth. The cosmic juggernaut, which is about as massive as 700 million suns, is taking aim at us from a galaxy in the early universe, up to 800 million years after the Big Bang — making this the most distant "blazar" ever found.
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, researchers discovered a new blazar, dubbed J0410−0139, using data from multiple telescopes, including the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the Magellan telescopes and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope — all located in Chile — and NASA's Chandra observatory in Earth-orbit.
Radio waves from this blazar traveled more than 12.9 billion light-years to reach us, which is a new record for this type of cosmic object. The shining behemoth's remarkable age could enable researchers to learn more about how the first supermassive black holes took shape and how these galactic nuclei have evolved ever since.
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. "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."
Oldest blazar yet
and is around 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, making it around 100 million years younger than J0410−0139.
Compared to the age of the universe, this age difference seems tiny. However, in those 100 million years, a supermassive black hole could grow by several orders of magnitude, making this a significant development.
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"Imagine that you read about someone who has won $100 million in a lottery," Bañados said. "Given how rare such a win is, you can immediately deduce that there must have been many more people who participated in that lottery but have not won such an exorbitant amount. Similarly, finding one [quasar] with a jet pointing directly toward us implies that at that time, there must have been many [quasars] in that period of cosmic history with jets that do not point at us."
, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in the statement.
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