The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons, said Edwin Hubble. Enter the radio “vision” of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which has revealed previously unseen details of a jet seen as it was when the universe was less than a billion years old, or just over 7 percent of its current age. The material was ejected at three-quarters the speed of light from the core of a galaxy some 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxy, dubbed PSO J0309+27, is a blazar, with its jet pointed toward Earth, and is the brightest radio-emitting blazar yet seen at such a distance. It also is the second-brightest X-ray emitting blazar at such a distance.
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The world’s astronomers are increasingly probing the mystery of where the enormous magnetic fields that permeate our universe come from –from Earth to Mars to the Milky Way to intergalactic voids and beyond to the darkest, most remote regions of the cosmos.
Your free weekly fix of news of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our fraught Anthropocene epoch.
“Ancient black holes would give us access to physics we would never otherwise be able to do,” wrote Dan Hooper, head of the theoretical astrophysics group at Fermilab, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. If primordial black holes are real, they’d have potential to solve a whole host of the biggest problems in cosmology, not the least being the mystery of dark matter, considered to be the backbone to the structure of the universe.
An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most-distant known galaxy, GN-z11s, a hefty13.4 billion light years away, indicating it was shining just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang, along with a brief ultraviolet flare of a powerful gamma ray burst–a phenomenon never before observed in the extremely early universe–that was detected in data from the Keck 1 telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The astronomers used deep spectroscopic analysis, discovering an unusual higher-than-expected concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, ruling out a first-generation galaxy.
