Powerful, radio-wavelength laser light has been detected emanating from the greatest distance across deep space yet.
It's a type of massless cosmic object called a megamaser, and its light has traveled for a jaw-dropping 5 billion light-years to reach us here on Earth. The astronomers who discovered it using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have named it Nkalakatha – an isiZulu word meaning "big boss".
The discovery has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv.
"It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser," said astronomer Marcin Glowacki of the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia.
"It shows just how good the telescope is."
A maser is the microwave equivalent of a laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). Rather than emitting visible light, a maser emits microwave and radio wavelengths that are stimulated and amplified. For an astrophysical maser, the processes that amplify the light are cosmic; planets, comets, clouds, and stars can all produce masers.
As you may have guessed it, a megamaser is therefore a maser with some serious oomph. Generally these emissions are produced by an object that is going absolutely ham in some way; for instance, active supermassive black holes can produce megamasers.
When the data came in from the first night of a survey planned for 3,000 hours, Glowacki and team found the signature of a very specific type of megamaser, bright in wavelengths amplified by stimulated hydroxyl molecules, consisting of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom. READ MORE...
