Recently, at the 246th Astronomical Society meeting held in Alaska, a research team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced an important discovery. Using observational data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Array (VLA), they identified two extremely bright supermassive black hole jets, whose X-ray radiation intensity is equivalent to the total brightness of 10 trillion suns.

These jets originated about 3 billion years after the birth of the universe. Because the background light of the early universe still exists, we can still clearly detect their shadows even tens of billions of light years away. Studies have shown that the length of these two jets is about 300,000 light years, far exceeding the diameter of the Milky Way.

The two jets come from two quasars: J1610+1811 and J1405+0415, which are 11.6 billion light years and 11.7 billion light years away from the earth respectively. Among them, the speed of particles in the jet of J1610+1811 reached 92% to 98% of the speed of light, while the speed of particles in the jet of J1405+0415 was 95% to 99% of the speed of light. The energy carried by a single jet is as high as half of the energy released by the accretion of matter by the black hole.

Jayama Ithil, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that these jets converted the faint light of the early universe into high-energy radiation. The high-energy electrons in the jet hit the photons of the cosmic microwave background radiation at a speed close to the speed of light, raising their energy to the X-ray band. In the early universe, the density of the cosmic microwave background radiation was much higher than it is today, which made these distant jets observable.

This study reveals that black hole activity may have been more intense than previously known in the early stages of the evolution of the universe. The relevant research results have been accepted and published by the Astrophysical Journal. Researchers believe that quasars are like time capsules that record the history of the universe, and in-depth research on them will help understand their specific impact on the evolution of the galaxy in which they are located.