Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.
Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.
The jet megastructure, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, dates to a time when our universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. These fierce outflows -- with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns -- shoot out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a remote galaxy.
"Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve, and one key aspect of this is that jets can spread huge amounts of energy that affect the growth of their host galaxies and other galaxies near them," says co-author George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy and data science at Caltech."This discovery shows that their effects can extend much farther out than we thought.
Back in 2018, Oei and his colleagues began using LOFAR to study not black hole jets but the cosmic web of wispy filaments that crisscrosses the space between galaxies. As the team inspected the radio images for the faint filaments, they began to notice several strikingly long jet systems. The team then used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to show that Porphyrion is 7.5 billion light-years from Earth."Up until now, these giant jet systems appeared to be a phenomenon of the recent universe," Oei says."If distant jets like these can reach the scale of the cosmic web, then every place in the universe may have been affected by black hole activity at some point in cosmic time," Oei says.
"We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg," Oei says."Our LOFAR survey only covered 15 percent of the sky. And most of these giant jets are likely difficult to spot, so we believe there are many more of these behemoths out there."How the jets can extend so far beyond their host galaxies without destabilizing is still unclear.
Galaxies Astrophysics Astronomy Cosmology Space Telescopes Extrasolar Planets Stars
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Biggest black hole jets ever seen span 140 Milky Way galaxiesAndrew Paul is Popular Science's staff writer covering tech news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A.V. Club and Input, and has had recent work featured by Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, as well as McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He lives outside Indianapolis.
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Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky WaysBen Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
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