This artist’s impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked. To date (early 2021), this is the most distant quasar with radio jets ever found and it was studied with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about 780 million years old. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Two Maunakea Observatories have been used to reveal the most distant – and therefore the youngest – known radio beacon in the early Universe. Seen as it was 780 million years after the big bang, the object – a quasar known as P172+18 – was originally discovered in images from the Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakalā, Maui. Detailed study with the Keck (infrared) and VLBA (radio) observatories on Maunakea, along with other telescopes worldwide, enabled its distance to be determined and revealed a “jet” of matter flying away from the central black hole of the quasar at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Read more, in the W. M. Keck and VLBA press releases.