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Feb 1, 2017

These powerful blazars are the most distant ever seen

Posted by in category: cosmology

Monster black holes shooting jets of gamma-ray radiation right at us have been spotted farther away than ever before, dating back to when the universe was nearly one-tenth its current age.

The five distant objects, called gamma-ray blazars, deepen the mystery of how black holes so large could have formed so early in the universe’s history.

Roopesh Ojha, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, presented the new results during a press conference today (Jan. 30) at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. The results will also be published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement. [Found: Gamma-Ray Blazars Powered by ‘Supersized’ Black Holes (Video)].

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