How can you miss an almost supernaturally bright beam of glowing gas emanating from the core of a galaxy? It is possible if that galaxy is 12.8 billion light years away.
Observations from the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have now revealed unknown things about the guts of the 13 billion-year-old galaxy PSO J0309 + 27. This galaxy is a blazar, actually a quasar on steroids. Its jet of super hot gas is aimed at Earth (but don’t start preparing for doomsday – it’s no danger to us). PSO J0309 + 27 is now the brightest radio-emitting blazar ever seen this far out in space, and it can be seen in the image above as it was when the universe was less than a billion years old.
With your mind blown up enough, the universe was only 7 percent of its current age when the blazar looked like this. A billion years is nothing in cosmic terms. Blazars from so early in the universe are rare, but analyzing the properties of this blazar can clarify why so few supposedly formed so far back in the depths of time.
“Little is known observationally [about the] when the Universe was young and the first sources (including active galactic nuclei, AGNs) ionized their surrounding gas in the period called cosmic reionization, ”said astronomer Cristiana Spignola, who led a study recently published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Some theoretical models exist as to why blazars were so rare at the beginning of the universe, and Spignola’s team was able to back them up with new observations from PSO J0309 + 27.
Blazars are fired with fuel from the supermassive black hole in the galactic center, also known as an active galactic core or AGN. Our own AGN is Sagittarius A * (Sagittarius A *). The black hole in a blazar takes even supermassive black holes to the limit. As the blazar’s black hole devours the star’s intestines and other matter swirling around in its accretion disk, the disk blows heat and sends energy from anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum into space. This includes the radio waves emitted by the AGN of PSO J0309 + 27, which is as massive as a billion suns.
Beams of energy are discharged at both ends of the AGN and basically set AGNs apart from other black holes, so what we see is the radius from only one end of the core of this blazar. Since blazars are spaced apart by the way their beams of radiation point straight toward Earth, we are engulfed in particles that took billions of years to reach us. However, the jets are thought to be transparent because high-energy photons are more likely to escape.
Far from fearing the beam of this blazar and building underground shelters, we should look forward to seeing through the portal it offers into the nascent universe.