Astronomers have just discovered a pair of jets emanating from the farthest black hole ever observed, stretching 23 million light-years long, equivalent to 140 connected Milky Ways.
This discovery suggests that these cosmic “monsters” may play a far more significant role in shaping galaxies than previously understood.
Supermassive black hole jets may be crucial in cosmic formation – (Illustration: PA).
This pair of jets, named Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, consists of supermassive ionized matter ejected from a black hole at nearly the speed of light. Its origin is a supermassive black hole located 7.5 billion light-years away from Earth, with power equivalent to thousands of trillions of stars.
Martijn Oei, the lead author of the study and an astrophysics expert at Caltech, emphasized: “These jets are not just the size of a solar system or the Milky Way; we are talking about a total of 140 diameters of the Milky Way. The Milky Way would just be a tiny dot in these two gigantic jets.”
This pair of jets was discovered among 10,000 other jets in a survey conducted by the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in Europe. Researchers combined visual observations, machine learning tools, and assistance from citizen scientists to identify jets they might have missed.
After detecting the first signs of Porphyrion, the research team conducted follow-up observations using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona to trace the origins of the jets to a colossal galaxy approximately ten times the size of the Milky Way.
This discovery suggests that jets from supermassive black holes may play a more crucial role in shaping the universe today than previously understood. Porphyrion also originates from a type of black hole common in the early universe, but was not previously believed to produce such massive jets, indicating that many more such eruptions may be lurking in the early universe.
Author Oei noted: “We may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg. Our LOFAR survey covers just 15% of the sky. Most of these colossal jets may be difficult to detect, so we believe there are many more ‘monsters’ out there.”
The researchers plan to investigate how these gigantic jets have shaped the early universe as they expelled cosmic rays, heavy atoms, heat, and magnetic fields across galaxies. From this, the scientific community hopes to gain a better understanding of the origins of magnetic fields in the universe and their role in the development of life.
