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An international team of astronomers has identified a rare class of gamma-ray emitting galaxies, known as London, lizards within the first 2,000 million years of the age of the Universe, the Spanish Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) reported on Tuesday.
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As explained by the IAC, only a small fraction of galaxies emit gamma rays, which are the most extreme form of light, and astronomers believe that these highly energetic photons originate nearby.and black holes supermassives that reside at the center of those galaxies.
He added that when this occurs they are known as active galaxies, and the black hole devours the matter around it and emits jets of matter and radiation.
Few of those galaxies (less than 1%) have these jets pointed towards the earth, what scientists call them blázares and they are one of the most powerful sources of radiation in the Universe.
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The team that identified these galaxies used the largest optical telescope in the world, the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), and is composed of researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid, DESY (Germany), University of California Riverside and Clemson University (EE. UU).
The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias also explained that blazars come in two types: BL Lacertae (BL Lac) and flat spectrum radioquasars (FSRQ).
Current knowledge of these mysterious astronomical objects establishes that the FSRQ they are relatively young active galaxies, rich in dust and gases surrounding the black hole.
Over time, the amount of matter available to power the black hole decreases and the FSRQ evolves into a BL Lac.
This means that the BL Lacs They may represent an older and more evolved phase in the life of a blazar, while FSRQs are more like an adult phase, points out Vaidehi Paliya, a DESY researcher participating in this program.
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Because the speed of light is limited, the more we look further, we are investigating the life of the Universe earlier, said Alberto Domínguez, of the UCM Institute of Cosmos and Particle Physics (IPARCOS) and co-author of the study.
Astronomers believe that the current age of Universe it is about 13.8 billion years old. The farthest known FSRQ has been identified at a distance from when the Universe was about 1 billion years old.
By comparison, the farthest known BL Lac was seen when the Universe was about 2.5 billion years old and the hypothesis that FSRQs evolve into BL Lac appears to hold.
Now an international team of scientists has discovered a new one BL Lac, named 4FGL J1219.0 + 3653, far beyond the previous distance record.
“We discovered a BL Lac that existed about 800 million years earlier, that is when the Universe was no more than 2 billion years old”, said Cristina Cabello, PhD student at IPARCOS-UCM.
This discovery “challenges” the current scenario that BL Lacs are an evolved phase of FSRQs, added Nicolás Cardiel, professor at IPARCOS-UCM.
Jesús Gallego, also a professor at the same institution and co-author of the study, concluded that this discovery challenges knowledge of the cosmic evolution of blazars and active galaxies in general.
EFE
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