Scientists have just discovered the most distant — and therefore the oldest — blazar ever observed, and its jet is pointing straight at us. Named J0410–0139, this cosmic behemoth sits at the heart of a galaxy 12.9 billion light-years away, giving us a rare glimpse into the universe when it was less than 800 million years old.
The discovery is said by experts to be a game-changer, challenging everything we thought we knew about the early universe and the supermassive black holes lurking within it. Researchers are now questioning how big these black holes could get, how quickly they grew, and just how many were out there in the universe's infancy.
The findings, published in Nature Astronomy and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, were made possible by cutting-edge facilities like the U.S. National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, the Very Long Baseline Array, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array).
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Blazars are already a rare find. They’re a special kind of active galactic nucleus (AGN), powered by supermassive black holes that can be billions of times the mass of our Sun. These black holes devour matter and shoot out jets of charged particles at nearly the speed of light. If one of these jets happens to be aimed directly at Earth, the object is classified as a blazar.
This unique alignment allows scientists to peer deep into the galaxy and study the black hole and its jet up close. Joe Pesce, program director at the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), commented on the matter, saying: "This observation adds to a body of findings indicating that supermassive black holes in the early universe aren't acting like we thought they should."
“These observations are surprising because we don't seem to understand supermassive black hole formation as well as we thought. But they are also exciting because it's a new mystery that we have to solve", he added.
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Emmanuel Momjian, co-lead of the study, highlights how crucial this blazar is for research. He said: "This blazar offers a unique laboratory to study the interplay between jets, black holes, and their environments during one of the universe's most transformative epochs."
J0410–0139 is officially the most ancient blazar ever detected. Its discovery suggests that supermassive black holes from this era either grew much faster than we previously believed or were simply born bigger than we thought possible.
As postdoc researcher Silvia Belladitta put it: "Where there is one, there's one hundred more."
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First author Eduardo Bañados agrees, stating, "Finding one AGN with a jet pointing directly towards us implies that at that time, there must have been many AGN in that period of cosmic history."
Similar to when you spot an insect and know there are likely many more hiding nearby, this discovery hints that supermassive black holes were far more common in the early universe than previously imagined.
With J0410–0139’s jet aimed straight at Earth, it’s a stark reminder of the immense cosmic forces at play in the depths of space.