Astronomers have discovered a new supermassive black hole that is shooting a giant beam of energy directly at Earth.. This black hole, which is a blazar, has a mass 700 million times that of the Sun and is located 12.9 billion light years away.. This oldest known blazar is shooting a beam of energy right at us. The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, writes Live Science.

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Some supermassive black holes that are found at the centers of galaxies are called quasars. These black holes have such enormous mass and gravity that they heat the matter in the surrounding accretion disk to hundreds of thousands of degrees Celsius.. Thus, quasars let in a huge amount of electromagnetic radiation. The magnetic fields of quasars convert this high-energy radiation into two jets that fly into space perpendicular to the black hole's accretion disk on both sides.. These jets can extend far beyond the galaxies where the quasar is located. Some quasars direct one of their jets directly to Earth and these supermassive black holes are called blazars. They, like quasars, are considered one of the brightest objects in the Universe..

Astronomers have discovered a new blazar, called J0410, 12.9 billion light-years away in the early Universe.? 0139. This is the oldest blazar known to astronomers, existing 900 million years after the Big Bang.. With this blazar, astronomers can learn more about how the first supermassive black holes formed and how they evolved over billions of years..

To date, astronomers have discovered fewer than 3,000 blazars, and all of them are closer to us than J0410? 0139. Before this discovery, the most distant and oldest blazar was PSO J0309+27. It was discovered 5 years ago and is located 12.8 billion light years from Earth.

Scientists believe that at such a far distance from the Earth, there are most likely many more supermassive black holes that either do not release jets or do not direct these jets towards the Earth. Therefore, scientists intend to continue the search for these objects in such an early period of the history of the Universe. Astronomers are especially keen to discover new blazars that existed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang..

As Focus already wrote, the Gaia space telescope, which spent 12 years mapping the Milky Way, has finished its work, but this is not the end. Although the European Space Agency telescope has ceased scientific operations, scientists will continue to process the data obtained and make new discoveries for a long time.

Focus also wrote that at a distance of 11.4 billion light years from us, astronomers discovered a supernova explosion of one of the very first stars in the Universe. It was precisely such explosions that seeded space with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which became the basis of future stars, including the Sun..