Astronomers have spotted two unprecedented plasma jets blasting out of a supermassive black hole and into space beyond its galaxy. The two extremely powerful plasma jets are the largest ever seen, measuring 23 million light years from end to end. This distance would cross approximately 140 Milky Ways arranged side by side.
Researchers who spotted this unprecedented phenomenon called the pair of plasma jets “Porphyrion” after a giant in Greek mythology.
The two jets originate from the top and bottom of the supermassive black hole and have the combined power of trillions of suns.
What exactly are black hole jets?
Black hole jet streams are a phenomenon made up of charged ions, electrons, and other particles. These are accelerated nearly to the speed of light by the enormous magnetic fields that surround black holes.
Astronomers have been aware of these jets for more than a century, but until recently, they were thought to be rare and not so extensive.
The two massive jets in question were first spotted by Europe’s Low-Frequency Array telescope. They were detected during a sky study that uncovered more than ten thousand of these.
Some of the black hole jets that have been spotted during this study are so powerful they push further than the black hole’s galaxy itself and deep into the voids of space.
These jets might have played a role in shaping the universe
Scientists who have been studying black hole jets are now confident they can extinguish the formation of a star and also eject large amounts of material and energy deep into space.
Experts have determined that the two massive black hole jets discovered show that small things and large things in the universe are “intimately connected.” This discovery is extremely significant because the black hole where the streams originate is producing a structure on a scale that is similar to cosmic filaments and voids.
The researchers who found Porphyrion then used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the VM Keck Observatory in Hawaii to pinpoint the black hole jet’s location to a galaxy ten times more massive than the Milky Way and around 1.5 billion light-years from Earth.
These black hole jet streams are so old they started to form once the universe was around 6.3 billion years old, which is less than half of its present age. Researchers also estimate it took the jets a billion years to grow to the length recently observed.
Following this discovery, researchers will turn their attention to the fact that these jets might have influenced the formation of galaxies, by heating the medium in the filaments in space.
