Science Results

An international team of astronomers in India, Japan, the USA and other countries has discovered a new active galaxy identified as the farthest gamma-ray emitting active galaxy known to date using the infrared spectrometer MOIRCS mounted on the Subaru Telescope. These objects are special active galaxies observed through high-energy gamma-rays believed to be emitted from their relativistic jets. They are rare, only 16 examples are known so far. The distance to this newly found active galaxy is about 9 billion light-years (Note 1) corresponding to a redshift of 1.344. This is the first time such an object has been found at a redshift of greater than 1. This discovery opens new avenues to explore more such gamma-ray emitting galaxies in the early Universe.

More details are available in the press release by Department of Science & Technology (DST) in India.


This study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters on March 27, 2021 (Rakshit et al. "TXS 1206 + 549: a new γ-ray-detected narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy at redshift 1.34?").


Note 1: We here adopt the light travel distance, which is the product of the speed of light and the travel time between the emission of the light at the object and the detection of the light at Earth.
Expressing the distance to remote objects