Largest black hole jets ever seen are 23 million light years long

Astronomers recently discovered the biggest pair of black hole jets ever observed and named this system Porphyrion. Imagine something so massive that it lines up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back. Then multiply that thought by two. It’s almost too much for our minds to fathom, but that’s exactly what they found.

Meet black hole jet system Porphyrion

Martijn Oei is a Caltech postdoctoral scholar with a flair for digging into the mysteries of the universe. His recent work published in a new Nature paper has everyone talking.

Oei and his team discovered this enormous pair of black hole jets named Porphyrion. Derived from Greek mythology, Porphyrion is a fitting moniker for a structure with such colossal proportions.

This jet megastructure not only spans 23 million light-years in total length, but it also dates back to when our universe was just 6.3 billion years old.

That’s less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. To put that into perspective, it’s like the universe was still in its adolescence.

These ferocious outflows of energy, with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns, emanate from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy.

Before Porphyrion, the record-holder for the largest jet system was Alcyoneus, another giant named after a figure in Greek mythology.

Alcyoneus, discovered in 2022 by the same team, measures about the equivalent of 100 Milky Ways. Comparatively, the Centaurus A jets, the closest major jet system to Earth, only spans 10 Milky Ways.

Shaking up the neighborhood

What makes Porphyrion’s discovery more groundbreaking is the implications it holds for our understanding of galaxy formation.

Co-author George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy and data science at Caltech, provided some insights on this.

“Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve, and one key aspect of this is that jets can spread huge amounts of energy that affect the growth of their host galaxies and other galaxies near them,” he says. “This discovery shows that their effects can extend much farther out than we thought.”

But Porphyrion’s scale reveals that the effects of these jets may extend far beyond our previous understanding.

Scanning the cosmos and black hole jets

The discovery of Porphyrion is part of a larger sky survey, which unveiled a staggering number of similar structures — over 10,000.

This massive population of gargantuan jets was found using Europe’s LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) radio telescope.

“Giant jets were known before we started the campaign, but we had no idea that there would turn out to be so many,” says Martin Hardcastle, second author of the study and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in England.

“Usually when we get a new observational capability, such as LOFAR’s combination of wide field of view and very high sensitivity to extended structures, we find something new, but it was still very exciting to see so many of these objects emerging.”

The origins of Porphyrion took the team across continents and observatories. They used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and supplementary data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

The observations pointed the team to a hefty galaxy, about 10 times more massive than our Milky Way, as the birthplace of Porphyrion.

Black hole jet system Porphyrion’s size

Porphyrion resides a mind-boggling 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. Its far-off residency and its emergence from a radiative-mode black hole suggest that it may not be a lone titan, but the harbinger of countless colossal jets yet to be discovered.

Oei suggests as much, saying, “We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg.”

There are still many unanswered questions surrounding these giant black hole jet systems. How do they extend so far and get so big without destabilizing?

“Martijn’s work has shown us that there isn’t anything particularly special about the environments of these giant sources that causes them to reach those large sizes,” says Hardcastle, who is an expert in the physics of black hole jets.

“My interpretation is that we need an unusually long-lived and stable accretion event around the central, supermassive black hole to allow it to be active for so long — about a billion years — and to ensure that the jets keep pointing in the same direction over all of that time. What we’re learning from the large number of giants is that this must be a relatively common occurrence,” Hardcastle concluded.

Surrounding influence and magnetism

How do they influence their surroundings? And perhaps most intriguingly, have these giant jets spread magnetism throughout the cosmos?

“We know magnetism pervades the cosmic web, then makes its way into galaxies and stars, and eventually to planets, but the question is: Where does it start?” Oei rightly says.

This research is the exciting beginning of a new chapter in our understanding of the universe. With the discovery of Porphyrion, we’re reminded that we still have a lot to uncover about the mysteries of the cosmos. Even a sky full of stars is just the beginning.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Video Credit: Caltech

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