Scientists have discovered a twin-lobed radio jet that spans twice the width of the Milky Way galaxy and was formed when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old.
Astronomers using a combination of telescopes discovered the radio jet that stretches an "astonishing" 200,000 light years - the largest radio jet ever found this early in the history of the universe, NOIRLab said.
Radio jets are "high-speed streams of particles and electromagnetic radiation that extend to a considerable distance from certain celestial objects," Science Direct explains.
"It's only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it's really far away," Anniek Gloudemans, postdoctoral research fellow at NOIRLab and lead author of the paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement.
"This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths," Gloudemans said.
It was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii that is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab.
"We were searching for quasars with strong radio jets in the early Universe, which helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies," Gloudeman said.
NOIRLab said the quasar, named J1601+3102, was formed when the universe was less than 1.2 billion years old - about 9% of its current age.
As quasars go, this one is smaller, weighing 450 million times the mass of the Sun.
"Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars," Gloudemans said. "This seems to indicate that you don't necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early Universe."
Previously discovered radio jets in the early universe have been attributed to noise from the cosmic microwave background remaining from the Big Bang creation of the universe, NOIRLab said.
