Astronomers have discovered extraordinarily powerful X-ray jets blasting from two supermassive black holes that are so ancient that the jets shine in the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Using data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), Maithil and her team found that each jet spans a whopping 300,000 light-years — nearly three times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. Each jet emerges from an actively feeding supermassive black hole, known as a quasar, located about 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away.
The researchers observed these immense structures as they appeared when the universe was just 3 billion years old, during a period when galaxies and their central black holes were growing at breakneck speed.
Source: www.space.com
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