Chandra Release - March 9, 2021

Visual Description: PJ352-15

The main panel of this graphic is an artist's illustration of a close-up view of a quasar and its jet, which resembles a beam of multicolored light shooting from a spiraling red ring. The distant ring is shown at our lower left, and the beam shoots toward us, crossing the image diagonally before exiting at our upper right. The red ring features a tangle of fine red lines encircling a black disk. This is the quasar; a rapidly growing black hole. The black disk at the quasar's center is the event-horizon, and the fine red lines represent the material swirling around it. Emerging from above this distant quasar is the multicolored beam, or jet. This jet is made up of energetic particles redirected away from the quasar. In the artist's illustration, the high-speed jet is brilliant white at its core, with streaks of violet and electric blue. A distinct orange and red cloud lines the motion-blurred jet.  

At our lower-right is an inset graphic which depicts what may be the most distant known supermassive black hole with an X-ray jet: a quasar known as PJ352-15. This graphic has been created using X-ray data from Chandra, optical data from the Gemini-North telescope, and infrared data from the Keck-I telescope. It shows several glowing dots and round shapes in purples and whites. Here, purple represents X-ray data, and white represents optical and infrared data. The clearest shape in this inset is a white circle outlined with a bright purple ring: the quasar PJ352-15. At its upper right is a small faint shape in a darker shade of purple. This is the X-ray jet from the quasar. While these shapes appear relatively close together in this graphic, because they are so distant they are in fact some 160,000 light years apart.