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Astronomers have discovered some of the most distant radio signals ever found. Reportedly, these signals traveled more than 13 billion light-years throughout the universe before being captured by scientists.
The signals arrived from a galactic core known as P172+18 and date back to when the universe was only 780 million years old. According to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, it was captured using a spectrograph on the Magellan Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
A team co-led by Eduardo Bañados, a staff astronomer of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, and Chiara Mazzucchelli, a research fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, chased these extremely rare radio signals, hoping to confirm if they were this distant or not.
The findings were confirmed with various telescopes, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, and the Keck Telescope. The observations revealed that P172+18 contains a supermassive black hole that is about 300 million times as massive as the Sun and absorbs material at one of the highest rates ever observed at such distances.
Read More: New astrophysics discovery shows how the Universe might end.
