This artist’s illustration shows the largest radio jet ever found in the early Universe. The jet was first identified using the international Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope, (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick)
LOS ANGELES - Telescopes worldwide have spotted a monster radio jet shooting out from a quasar that dates back to the first billion years of the universe.
The jet of radio waves is double the width of our Milky Way galaxy and is the biggest ever detected so early in the universe's history, astronomers said on Thursday.
Largest ever detected
Dig deeper:
Radio jets like this are not uncommon in our cosmic neighborhood. But they've been elusive in the distant early universe — until now — because of the obscuring cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.
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What they're saying:
"It’s only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away," lead author Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation's NoirLab said in a statement.
Quasar J1601+3102
The backstory:
A quasar is formed when dust and gas fall into a black hole and let out enormous amounts of energy due to friction, according to NoirLab.
The result is a luminous galactic core called a quasar which can expel jets of energetic matter.
The quasar involved in this study, J1601+3102, is relatively small, researchers said. It weighs about 450 million times the mass of our sun.
The double-sided radio wave that is being shot out from the quasar is estimated to be at least 200,000 light-years across. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
The Source: Information for this article was gathered from The Associated Press and NoirLab. This story was reported from Los Angeles.