Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2025

50 MAY-JUNE 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING questions about how radio-bright quasars like J1601+3102 differ from other quasars. It remains unclear what circumstances are necessary to create such powerful radio jets, or when the first radio jets in the Uni- verse formed. Thanks to the collab- orative power of Gemini North, LOFAR and the Hobby Eberly Tele- scope, we are one step closer to un- derstanding the enigmatic early Universe. U sing a combination of telescopes, astronomers have discovered the largest radio jet ever found in the early Universe. The jet was first identified using the international Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope, a network of radio tele- scopes throughout Europe. Follow-up observations in the near-infrared with the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS), and in the optical with the Hobby Eberly Telescope, were obtained to paint a complete picture of the radio jet and the quasar producing it. GNIRS is mounted on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab. The optical image shown here comes from the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS), one of three public surveys that jointly imaged 14,000 square degrees of sky to provide targets for the ongoing Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Survey. [LOFAR/DECaLS/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/F. Sweijen (Durham University). Image processing: M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)] ! treme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away,” says Gloudemans. “This ob- ject shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths.” “When we started looking at this object we were expecting the south- ern jet to just be an unrelated nearby source, and for most of it to be small. That made it quite surpris- ing when the LOFAR image revealed large, detailed radio structures,” says Frits Sweijen, postdoctoral re- search associate at Durham Univer- sity and co-author of the paper. “The nature of this distant source makes it difficult to detect at higher radio frequencies, demonstrating the power of LOFAR on its own and its synergies with other instru- ments.” Scientists still have a multitude of