Massive jets of material shooting from a black hole dwarf even the largest galaxies, scientists say.

Massive jets of material shooting from a black hole dwarf even the largest galaxies, scientists say. CNN NEWS

(CNN)_Astronomers have observed a massive pair of jets releasing from a supermassive black hole 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The megastructure spans 23 million light-years in length, making these black hole jets the largest ever seen, according to new research.

Black holes are viewed as the garbage disposals of the universe, gobbling up nearly everything that comes close to them. But a fraction of material is ejected before an object falls in, forming a jet on either side of the black hole, said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study describing the discovery.

The findings were published September 18 in the journal Nature.

(CNN)_Massive jets of material shooting from a black hole dwarf even the largest galaxies, scientists say

Black hole jets can accelerate radiation and particles close to the speed of light, causing them to glow in wavelengths visible to radio telescopes. Such a glow drew the attention of astronomers behind the new study while they were surveying the sky using Europe’s LOFAR, or LOw Frequency ARray radio telescope, in 2018.

The newly described jets have a power output equivalent to that of trillions of suns and are so massive that researchers have nicknamed the megastructure Porphyrion after a giant from Greek mythology.

The discovery is causing astronomers to rethink their understanding of how massive black hole jets can be as well as how these giant features can affect their surroundings and the structure of the universe.

“This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” Oei said. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.”

(CNN)_Massive jets of material shooting from a black hole dwarf even the largest galaxies, scientists say

Seeking the cosmic web
Initially, the researchers were looking for something else using LOFAR: the wispy filaments of the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the large-scale structure of the universe, a network of matter that pervades all the space between galaxies, Oei said.

But while seeking to observe the cosmic web, the team discovered large jets coming from galaxies. In total, the team spotted 10,000 new black hole jet pairs. A paper describing the pairs has been accepted for publication in another journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“When we first found the giant jets, we were quite surprised,” Oei said. “We had no idea that there were this many.”

Supermassive black holes lie at the centers of large galaxies. The team’s observations highlighted that an increasing number of galaxies have black hole jets reaching far beyond their borders, Oei said.

A researcher from a different field, study coauthor Aivin Gast, first spotted the most massive pair of jets.

At the time, Gast was an undergraduate student studying classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Oxford. But due to the pandemic, his main academic work was on hold, so he offered to help Oei with a visual inspection of the radio images captured by LOFAR.

“After finding Porphyrion, we were both very excited, and after talking it over I felt the thrill of seeing and co-discovering something special that no one had appreciated before,” Oei said via email.

Once the team confirmed the galaxy where the jets originated, “Aivin leveraged his classical background and proposed to give the system the beautiful name ‘Porphyrion,’ which it now bears,” Oei added.

Before the LOFAR observations, large jet systems were thought to be rare and expected to be smaller in size. Before Porphyrion was spotted, the largest confirmed black hole jet system was Alcyoneus.