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Mar 30, 2020

Astronomers Observe Blasting Supermassive Black Hole Jets From The Early Universe

Posted by in category: cosmology

O,.,o.


In the far reaches of the Universe, astronomers have managed to capture a rare interaction. As a supermassive black hole ravenously slurps down matter around it, it’s sending out jets of plasma — pushing into and heating the gas in the galaxy around it.

This is difficult to capture at the best of times, but this case was a particularly impressive feat. The galaxy in question is a whopping 11 billion light-years away — when the Universe was less than 3 billion years old.

It’s called MG J0414+0534, and astronomers managed to capture it in detail because of gravitational lensing. In between us and the galaxy is a different, rather massive galaxy whose gravity distorts the path of the light travelling from behind it, creating four images of MG J0414+0534 around it (see image below).

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