A black hole has blasted out a powerful jet into space, so deep in the distant Universe that it's being illuminated by the remnant glow from the Big Bang.
The black hole is 11.6 billion lightyears from Earth, meaning astronomers are seeing it as it existed 11.6 billion years ago.
Given the Universe itself is only 13.8 billion years old, this is a period in time known as the 'cosmic noon'.
At this point in time, the Cosmic Microwave Background, the leftover glow from the Big Bang, was denser than it is now.
As electrons in the jets fly away from the black hole, they move through Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and collide with microwave photons.
These collisions boost the energy of the photons and make them glow in X-ray, which means they can be observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
This effect is seen in purple and white in the images released as part of this study.
Not one black hole, but two
The astronomers actually confirmed two different black holes with jets over 300,000 lightyears long.
These black holes are 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion lightyears away from Earth.
Particles in one jet, called J1405+0415, are moving between 95% and 99% the speed of light.
In the other, J1610+1811, they're moving between 92% and 98% the speed of light.
The jet from J1610+1811 has about half as much energy as the light from hot gas orbiting the black hole.
Astronomers used Chandra along with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study the black holes and their jets.
The period in time is the 'cosmic noon', just 3 billion years after the birth of the Universe.
During this time most galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other period in cosmic history.
