At cosmic high noon, black holes fired their jets

by | June 14, 2025, 2:01 PM | Galaxies & Cosmology

ACcording to Chandra: This release is supported by an artist's illustration of a jet blasting away from a supermassive black hole. The black hole sits near the center of the illustration. It resembles a black marble with a fine yellow outline. Surrounding the black hole is a swirling disk, resembling a dinner plate tilted to face our upper right. This disk comprises concentric rings of fiery swirls, dark orange near the outer edge, and bright yellow near the core. Shooting out of the black hole are two streaky beams of silver and pale violet. One bright beam shoots up toward our upper right, and a second somewhat dimmer beam shoots in the opposite direction, down toward our lower left. These beams are encircled by long, fine, corkscrewing lines that resemble stretched springs. This black hole is located 11.6 billion light-years from Earth, much earlier in the history of the universe. Near this black hole, the leftover glow from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB, is much denser than it is now. As the electrons in the jets blast away from the black hole, they move through the sea of CMB radiation. The electrons boost the energies of the CMB light into the X-ray band, allowing the jets to be detected by Chandra, even at this great distance. Inset at our upper righthand corner is an X-ray image depicting this interaction. Here, a bright white circle is ringed with a band of glowing purple energy. The jet is the faint purple line shooting off that ring, aimed toward our upper right, with a blob of purple energy at its tip.
An artist’s illustration of an active galaxy with jets with an inlaid image of an actual galaxy with jets as seen by Chandra. Credit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/J. Maithil et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Most large galaxies have massive black holes in their core, and woe to the star, dust cloud, or other object that gets too close to their gravity wells. These giant monsters are capable of shredding stars and transforming any material into a luminous accretion disk rich in charged particles that can drive magnetic fields that stream high-energy particles in high-speed jets.

In our modern day, most supermassive blackholes lay dormant. They have already consumed all their easy meals. When the universe was young, however, food was plentiful and active galactic nuclei were common.

Astronomers sometimes refer to the era of active galaxies, when the universe was about 3 billion years old, as Cosmic Noon. While studying this epic, the Chandra X-ray observatory captured X-ray photons associated with high-energy electrons in Black Hole Jets.

This is not a gentle process – Cosmic Microwave Background photons can scatter off the high-speed electrons jetting out of black hole systems and transform that energy from motion into high-wavelength light – X-Ray light – that Chandra can see.

In a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers led by Jaya Maithil use new data processing algorithms to identify two systems with extremely long jets pointed almost directly at us, which are moving at nearly the speed of light. In one system, the jet is moving at 95-99% the speed of light, and in the other clocks in at 92-98% the speed of light. Their jets measure more than 300,000 light years from their galaxies’ cores.

These systems are dynamically changing their environment. Light from the accretion disk where they originate can push material away from the galactic core and irradiate the galactic core, ultimately starving the blackhole while also disrupting and/or irradiating solar systems trying to form in the blast zone. The jets can also push away material near the galaxy, and their ionizing light can set the remaining material aglow.

These are powerful and deadly systems, and it is safe to say that some dreamed of ancient civilizations were prevented from coming into existence by these jet-wielding active black holes.

Aren’t you glad they mostly existed early in the universe?

This research was funded by NASA and utilized both the NASA-funded Chandra X-ray observatory and the NSF-funded Very Large Array.