A distant supermassive black hole has been spotted firing an extraordinarily powerful beam of radiation and matter at us. This object, called a blazar, could help us figure out how the universe has changed in the past 13 billion years.
Alberto Moretti at Italy鈥檚 National Institute for Astrophysics and his colleagues found this incredibly bright blazar by comparing data from several different sky surveys, and then measured its characteristics using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the Swift space telescope.
They found that it is more than 27 billion light years away, so the light we see now left the blazar when the universe was still relatively young 鈥� only about 900 million years old. It is blasting more radio waves and X-rays at us than any other black hole that far away.
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鈥淎t this epoch, less than one billion years after the big bang, the universe was very different from the universe that we know,鈥� says Moretti. 鈥淭his blazar can bring important information from this epoch to us.鈥�
Most of that information will require additional observations. The researchers calculated how rare this type of jet is. At the distance it sits from Earth, there should be just one blazar as bright as this or brighter in a volume of space of about 500 billion cubic light years.
The blazar鈥檚 jet is particularly promising for studying how the material between galaxies has evolved over time, Moretti says. The light in the jet had to travel between the blazar and us, and examining how it has changed along the way could help us learn about a period when the first galaxies were聽beginning to form.
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