Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery of incredibly powerful X-ray jets coming from two supermassive black holes that are so ancient they illuminate the aftermath of the Big Bang.

During the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska, Jaya Maithil, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, revealed this remarkable find. She explained that these jets are converting the earliest light of the universe into high-energy beams.

Utilizing data from Nasa's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), Maithil and her team determined that each jet extends an incredible 300,000 light-years, which is almost three times the size of our Milky Way galaxy. These jets originate from supermassive black holes that are actively consuming matter, known as quasars, situated approximately 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away.

These colossal structures were observed when the universe was only 3 billion years old, a period when galaxies and their central black holes were expanding rapidly. Maithil described these quasars as cosmic time capsules that can provide insight into how they influenced the growth of their galaxies and surrounding environments.

In a Chandra image, one of the newly discovered jets from a quasar named J1610+1811 is visible. A faint purple line extends from the quasar's bright white core towards the upper right, ending in a small bright blob. Another less prominent jet shoots in the opposite direction, downward and to the left.

Maithil likened the process of spotting these jets to finding candlelight near a blazing flashlight. What sets these jets apart is their visibility over billions of light-years. In a forthcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal, Maithil and her team propose that the jets emit X-rays due to interactions with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the residual radiation from the Big Bang that persisted after the universe cooled enough for starlight to travel freely, marking the end of the 'cosmic dark ages'.