The Most Distant X-Ray Jet.

A false-color x-ray image inset at upper left reveals emission from a cosmic jet of high-energy particles, 100,000 light-years in length, emerging from quasar GB1508+5714 . An estimated 12 billion (12,000,000,000) light-years away, this appears to be the most distant energetic jet in the known Universe . Astrophysical jets of many sizes seem to be produced in a range of environments where significant accretion, or infalling matter is thought to arrange itself in a disk , from contracting star-forming clouds to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei . Here, as depicted in the illustration, the accretion disk is thought to surround a supermassive black hole , accelerating particles to near the speed of light in two jets at right angles to the disk itself. In the case of this quasar , the jet tilted towards us is visible in x-rays as the particles collide with low energy photons from the cosmic background radiation. The collisions boost the photons to higher x-ray energies and scatter some of them in our direction.