Astronomers have spotted two record-breaking plasma jets shooting from a supermassive black hole into the void behind its host galaxy.
The extremely powerful plasma streams are the largest ever seen, measuring 23 million light-years from end to end, a distance equivalent to 140 Milky Way galaxies arranged side by side.
Researchers have named the stunning pair of jets Porphyry, after a giant in Greek mythology. The narrow, violent jets shoot out from above and below the supermassive black hole, and their combined power is equivalent to trillions of suns.
Black hole jets are streams of charged ions, electrons, and other particles. These particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light by the enormous magnetic fields surrounding black holes. Such jets have been known for more than a century, but until recently they were thought to be rare and not widespread.
The porphyry was spotted by the European Low Frequency Telescope (LOFAR) during a sky survey that revealed more than 10,000 jets from supermassive black holes. Many of them are so powerful that they are pushed far beyond the black hole’s host galaxy and deep into the vast voids of the cosmic web, the web of matter that connects galaxies.
Given the size of Porphyry, astronomers now suspect that such giant jets play a role in shaping the evolution of the universe. Black hole jets can kill star formation, but they can also blast vast amounts of matter and energy into the depths of space.
“Porphyrians show that small things and big things in the universe are intimately connected,” said Dr. Martin Ooi, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in the United States and lead author of the study. A research paper from Nature magazine talks about this discovery.“We see a single black hole producing structure on a scale similar to that of cosmic filaments and voids.”
After spotting the planet Porphyry, the researchers, including Martin Hardcastle, professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, used the Giant Meteorite Radio Telescope in India and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to pinpoint its location within a galaxy 10 times larger than the Milky Way and about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.
The porphyry jets began forming when the universe was about 6.3 billion years old, less than half its current age, and it took the jets about a billion years to grow to their observed length, the researchers believe.
“There may have been more jet systems of black holes similar to Porphyry in the past, and together they may have had a significant impact on the cosmic web by influencing the formation of galaxies, heating the medium in filaments, and also magnetizing the cosmic void. That’s what we want to get to now,” Oye said.
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