Black hole detected firing powerful beam of energy towards Earth

Science: Astronomers have detected a supermassive black hole some 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth and is firing a super powerful beam of energy towards our world. The beam of energy from the black hole, detected as a “blazar”, has travelled to the Earth only just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which is a new record for the distance from which such a phenomenon is observed, a study report published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters said.

There are umpteen supermassive black holes in the Universe that produce powerful jets of high-energy particles that create extreme brightness, and when such a black hole sends its jet directly to the Earth, it is called a blazar.

The new discovery leads to questions about how supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the Universe’s infancy, the study stated.

The freshly detected blazar is named J0410-0139, and it has a mass of about 700 million Suns and is believed to be the oldest of its kind among known ones. According to the study, the black hole, which was observed through NASA's Chandra Observatory and Chile's Very Large Telescope, has provided a new idea about the new early Universe.

One of the authors of the study, Dr Emmanuel Momjian, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, said that the black hole’s “jet with our line of sight allows astronomers to peer directly into the heart of this cosmic powerhouse”, NDTV quoted. He added that it offers a unique laboratory to study the interplay between jets, black holes and their environment during “one of the Universe’s most transformative epochs.