Telescopes observe a massive radio wave from a bright, early object in the universe

Telescopes around the world have observed a giant radio wave emanating from a quasar dating back to the first 1 billion years of the universe.

A quasar is a rare type of extremely bright galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center.

Twice the size of our Milky Way galaxy, this radio wave is the largest ever detected so early in the history of the universe, astronomers said Thursday.

Such radio waves are not uncommon in outer space. But they have been elusive in the distant early universe, until now, because of the dark background of microwaves left over from the Big Bang.

"The reason it can be observed from Earth, even though it is so far away, is the extreme size of the object," Anniek Gloudemans with NoirLab at the National Science Foundation said in a statement.

Observatories in Europe, Hawaii and Texas contributed to the study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The double-edged radio wave is estimated to extend at least 200,000 light-years. A light-year is about 9.3 trillion kilometers.

Discovered a few years ago, the quasar emitting this giant radio wave formed when the universe was about 9% of its current age, or within the first 1.2 billion years.

Some of the brightest objects in the universe, quasars are galactic cores of gas and dust that fall into a black hole, releasing an incredible amount of energy that makes them extremely bright. The mass of this quasar is 450 million times the mass of our sun with a black hole that is not particularly massive.