An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the observation of jets of energetic particles coming from a supermassive black hole interacting with clouds of gas around them in the quasar MG J0414+0534, about 11 billion light years away. A team of researchers used the ALMA radio telescope to observe that quasar, but its details were detected thanks to a gravitational lensing effect generated by a galaxy between the quasar and the Earth. The interaction between jets and clouds suggests that the quasar’s radio activity is at an early stage and therefore useful to better understand the early stages of evolution of the galaxies that host a quasar in the early universe.

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the observation of what was called the largest explosion discovered in the universe after the Big Bang and caused by the supermassive black hole in the galaxy at the center of the Ophiuchus supercluster. A team of astronomers led by Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory combined X-ray observations with ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra space telescopes with those at radio frequencies conducted with Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) radio telescopes to map the cavity generated by that cataclysmic event, about 15 times the Milky Way’s size.