Scientists have discovered a record-breaking pair of jets streaming from a black hole in a distant galaxy. The jets shooting hot plasma are the largest ever spotted—about as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up end-to-end, the AP reports. The discovery, made using images from a European radio telescope, was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. Black holes eat most space debris that falls their way. Sometimes, heated-up plasma makes a narrow escape by spewing out in thin, high-energy jets. The jets can break apart soon after their creation, jostled by space turbulence or starved in the absence of new matter. But jets from supermassive black holes can become supersized.
The latest combined jets from a faraway supermassive black hole are around 23 million light-years long. That's about 7 million light-years longer than the previous recordholder. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. The researchers named the jets, which emit as much power as trillions of suns, Porphyrion, after a giant in Greek mythology, the Guardian reports. Study co-author Martijn Oei at the California Institute of Technology says researchers weren't expecting to find long black hole jets so early in the universe's history.
The jets began to form 6.3 billion years ago, when the universe was less than half its current age, researchers say. Studying the jets could reveal whether they had an influence on how the early universe came to be, Oei says. "More Porphyrion-like black hole jet systems could have existed in the past and together these could have a major impact on the cosmic web by influencing the formation of galaxies, heating up the medium in the filaments, and also they could magnetize the cosmic void," Oei says, per the Guardian. "This is what we want to go after now." (More black holes stories.)
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