Astronomers have discovered the largest pair of jets (energy jets) from a black hole ever seen.
Their total length is 23 million light years, which is equivalent to placing 140 Milky Way galaxies next to each other, the press service of the California Institute of Technology (USA) reports.
The Milky Way would have been a tiny dot in these two giant eruptions, the researchers note.
The streaming megastructure, named Porphyrion after the giant in Greek mythology, dates back to when our Universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its current age of 13.8 billion years.
These mad outflows – with a combined power equivalent to trillions of suns – are shooting out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy.
Before Porphyrion’s discovery, the most confirmed such jet system was Alcyonea, also named after a giant in Greek mythology:
- Discovered in 2022 by the same team that found Porphyrion, Alcyoneus spans a distance equivalent to about 100 Milky Ways;
- For comparison, the large jet system Centaurus A, the closest to Earth, is known to span 10 Milky Ways.
It is noted that the latest discovery suggests that these giant jet systems may have had a greater influence on the formation of galaxies in the early Universe than previously thought:
- Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve, and one key aspect of this is that the jets can release enormous amounts of energy that influence the growth of their host galaxies and other galaxies near them;
- Porphyrion existed in an early era when the thin threads that connect and feed galaxies, known as the cosmic web, were closer together than they are now;
- This means that jets as large as the porphyrion covered a larger portion of the cosmic web than jets in the local universe, so their influence may extend much further than previously thought.
Until now, these giant jet systems were considered a phenomenon of the recent Universe, the scientists note. If such distant jets can reach the scale of the cosmic web, then every place in the Universe could have experienced the influence of black hole activity at a certain point in cosmic time.
Why structures like Porphyrion were able to extend so far beyond their galaxies without destabilizing is still unclear:
- nothing was found in their environment that would cause them to reach such large sizes;
- it takes an extremely long-term and stable energy-absorption event by a supermassive black hole to allow it to be active for so long – about a billion years – and to ensure that the jets continue to shoot in the same direction for all that time;
- At the same time, the large number of such giant formations indicates that this must be a relatively common phenomenon.
The Porphyrion system is the largest ever found in a survey of the sky, which has revealed a staggering number of such megastructures: more than 10,000. This huge population of giant jets was discovered using the European radio telescope LOFAR (LOW Frequency ARray).
Although hundreds of large jet systems were known before LOFAR observations, they were considered rare and, on average, smaller in size than the thousands of systems discovered by radio telescopes.
Giant jets were known even before the start of our campaign, but we had no idea that there would be so many of them, the scientists note.
Back in 2018, they began using LOFAR to study not black hole jets, but the cosmic web that crisscrosses the space between galaxies. While scanning the radio image for faint filaments, the team began to notice some strikingly long jet systems.
When we first found the giant jets, we were very surprised, the researchers note. – We had no idea there were so many of them.
The most powerful stellar black holes in our galaxy.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.