A team of astronomers using the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope has discovered the largest black hole jets ever observed, spanning a staggering 23 million light-years across, CNN reports.
These jets, emanating from a supermassive black hole located 7.5 billion light-years from Earth, are so massive that researchers have nicknamed them “Porphyrion” after a giant from Greek mythology.
“Black holes are like cosmic garbage disposals, sucking in everything that comes close,” explains Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study published in Nature. “But some material gets ejected before it’s swallowed, forming jets on either side of the black hole.”
These jets accelerate particles and radiation close to the speed of light, causing them to glow in radio wavelengths. While surveying the sky in 2018, astronomers noticed a particularly bright glow originating from this massive structure. The team estimates the power output of these jets is equivalent to trillions of suns.
This discovery challenges our understanding of black hole jets and their impact on the surrounding environment.
“We initially thought these massive jets were only produced by the ‘jet-mode’ black holes, which are more common in the nearby universe,” says Oei. However, the Porphyrion jets were found to originate from a “radiative-mode” black hole, a type typically associated with smaller jets.
The finding has significant implications for our understanding of the universe’s evolution. The cosmic web, a vast network of matter spanning the universe, is thought to be shaped by black hole jets. The immense scale of Porphyrion suggests these jets could play a crucial role in magnetizing the universe and shaping the large-scale structures of the cosmic web.
The research team is currently investigating how these jets can extend so far beyond their host galaxy without becoming unstable.
