Ancient light from the dawn of the universe has illuminated a 300,000 light-year-long jet shooting from a supermassive black hole.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory spotted the supermassive black hole jet in a system known as B3 0727+409. Light from the jet was sent out when the universe — which is currently about 13.8 billion years old — was 2.7 billion years old, NASA said.
The study's authors think the jet in B3 0727+409 is boosting the signal from the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) — a literal glow of light left over from the Big Bang — allowing Chandra to catch sight of the distant object.
"Most people think of black holes as exotic objects that 'suck in' all of the matter around them, and from which nothing, not even light, can escape," Aurora Simionescu, co-author of a new study detailing the Chandra discovery, said in a blog post.
"While this it is true that, once anything has fallen in 'over the edge' or so called 'event horizon' of the black hole, it can never leave it again, a lot of interesting physics happens right before matter gets swallowed forever."
It's possible that the particles in the black hole jet slam into microwave photons in the CMB, exciting them and "boosting" their energy up to the point where they glow in X-ray, NASA said.
The origins of the jets are mysterious, but Simionescu added that some material that is about to fall into the black hole may be "accelerated" to great speeds and pushed away from the black hole, forming the jets.
"Nobody understands the exact details of how this happens, but probably through a twisted geometry of the magnetic fields, some of the material swirling around just on the verge of falling into the black hole is sometimes accelerated in really energetic jets moving away from the black hole instead," Simionescu wrote.
What exactly the jets are is still a mystery to scientists, as is how some jets are able to emit X-rays.
Astronomers have studied plenty of jets from black holes in the nearby universe, but the jet in the B3 0727+409 is one of only a few X-ray-emitting jets seen in the far-off cosmos, Simionescu said.
In astronomy, space and time are related. The light from an object in the distant universe like the black hole jet in B3 0727+409 took billions of years to reach Chandra's detectors, giving scientists some insight into what the strange jet looked like in X-ray wavelengths long ago, when the CMB was more intense.
Usually, these objects are observed using radio wavelengths of light, which are far from X-rays on the spectrum of light, and according to Simionescu, the jet in this particular system seems to have very little signal in radio wavelengths.
This new finding could have far-reaching implications for how scientists study black hole jets in the future as well.
"If bright X-ray jets can exist with very faint or undetected radio counterparts," co-author Lukasz Stawarz said in a statement, "it means that there could be many more of them out there because we haven’t been systematically looking for them."
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