Scientists discover 53 powerful quasars shooting out jets up to 50 times wider than our Milky Way

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Astronomers have discovered 53 new supermassive quasars propelled by black holes that shoot out near-light-speed jets of material that extend up to 7.2 million light-years away, or about 50 times the width of the Milky Way.

These monster objects, known as Giant radio quasarsare part of a group of 369 radioquasars recently discovered by Indian astronomers in data collected by the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an array of 30 dishes located near Pune, India, as part of the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey (TGSS). The TGSS covered approximately 90% of the celestial sphere above Earth, with its wide sky coverage and high sensitivity making it the ideal instrument for spotting gigantic, distant radio-emitting structures like giant radio quasars.

“The size of these radiojets is not comparable to that of our solar system or even our galaxy,” team member Souvik Manik, a researcher at Midnapore City College, said in an emailed statement. “We are talking about 20 to 50 diameters of the Milky Way placed side by side.”

However supermassive black holes with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun, they are thought to be found at the hearts of all large galaxies, not all of these cosmic titans power bright central regions called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) or are considered “quasars”, which are extremely powerful galactic nuclei.

To power a quasar, a supermassive black hole must be surrounded by a multitude of gases and dust from which it can feed. This material swirls around supermassive black holes in flattened cloud structures called accretion disks. The enormous gravitational influence of supermassive black holes generates powerful tidal forces in accretion disks, heating this material, causing it to emit bright radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum.

However, black holes are notoriously messy eaters, and not all the matter in accretion disks is fed to them. Strong magnetic fields channel highly ionized gas, or plasma, toward the poles of the supermassive black hole, where it is accelerated to near-light speeds and thrown in opposite directions as powerful twin jets. Over time, and as they reach distances of several light years from their source, these jets can spread into large plumes or “lobes” extending well above and below the plane of the galaxy from which they emerge. The jets and lobes are accompanied by strong radio wave emissions.

“Their enormous radio jets make these quasars valuable for understanding both the late stages of their evolution and the intergalactic medium in which they develop, the tenuous gas that confines their radio lobes millions of light-years from the central black hole,” said team leader Sabyasachi Pal, an astronomer at Midnapore City College. “However, finding such giants is not easy.” The researcher explained that this is because the weak “bridge” of emissions that connects the two lobes often fades below detection limits, making the overall structure appear broken or incomplete.

“Low-frequency radio surveys are particularly effective in identifying these systems because the aged synchrotron plasma in the lobes emits more strongly at low radio frequencies than at higher frequencies,” Pal continued.

The team noticed an interesting trend regarding giant radio quasars and the environments in which they reside, finding that about 14 percent of these monstrous objects are found in galaxy groupings and clusters and near cosmic filaments of gas, dust, and dark matter where galaxies gather and grow.

“It appears that the environment plays a major role in the evolution of these radio planes,” team member Netai Bhukta from Sidho Kanho Birsha University in Lagda, India, said in the release. “In denser regions, jets can be slowed, bent or disrupted by surrounding gas, while in emptier regions they can expand freely through the intergalactic medium.”

Although most quasars feature twin jets, scientists have noticed that these jets are often unequal in length or brightness, a disparity called radio jet asymmetry.‌ “This asymmetry tells us that these jets are battling an uneven cosmic environment,” said team member Sushanta K. Mondal, also of Sidho Kanho Birsha University. “On one side, the jet can sink into denser clouds of intergalactic gas, slowing its growth, while on the other side it expands freely through a thinner medium.” ‌

The team’s results seem to indicate that giant quasars located at greater distances appear to exhibit greater jet asymmetry compared to those closer to the Milky Way. This could be because the farther away these quasars are, the further back in time we observe them, and the early cosmos was much more chaotic and filled with denser gases that distorted the trajectories of these jets.

The team’s research was published November 13 in The American Astronomical Society Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.