23 million light-years-wide black hole jets discovered

Astronomers have made a breathtaking revelation: The most massive discovered black hole jets, extending on to incredibly 23 million light-years. To look it through that lens, that’s approximately the length of 140 Milky Way galaxies positioned in a straight line. The immense jets, named ‘Porphyrion’ after a mythological Greek giant, emerge from a supermassive black hole at the center of a faraway galaxy that was in existence when the universe was only 6.3 billion years old- - close to half its existing age of 13.8 billion years.
Incomparable power
These black hole jets are not merely immense; they are exceptionally powerful. “In this case, the two jets have a combined power of 10^39 watts! That is equivalent to the energy output of trillions of stars, or about 100 galaxies combined”, stated Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of the study. Oei stressed the massive scale: “We are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total. The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.”
Shaping the early universe
The discovery of Porphyrion indicates that massive jet flows like these might have been significant in influencing galaxy formations in the early universe. In a timeframe when Porphyrion was formed, the cosmic web- - a web of filaments connecting galaxies- - was significantly more compact. This authorized colossal jets to affect a more expansive area in contrast to jets of a comparable nature in the current universe.
Oei explained: “In the last few decades, astronomers have done numerous observations and numerical simulations that show that the heat dissipated by black hole jets warms the interstellar medium (ISM). This increases the pressure of the ISM, and prevents gas clouds from collapsing into stars.” He included, “So, black hole jets slow down the formation of new stars. This ‘stellar birth control’ makes sure that galaxies don’t evolve too quickly.”
Determining the jets’ origin
To determine the galaxy that is behind causing the Porphyrion, researchers utilized the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona. They mapped the jets back to a massive galaxy approximately ten times the size of the Milky Way, situated 7.5 billion light-years away from Earth. “Up to now, giant jets have been seen mostly in the more recent or ‘nearby’ Universe”, Oei stated.
The mystery of stability
Regardless of the enormous size, how these jets can extend so far without destabilizing remains a mystery. Martin Hardcastle, co-author of the study, highlighted 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.” This stability has the potential to help the jets to align over time.
Investigating cosmic magnetism
Stepping forward, Oei seeks to explore how these colossal jets influence their environments. He elaborates, “The jets distribute cosmic rays, heat, heavy elements, and magnetic fields across the regions between galaxies.” His attention will be focused on whether giant jets such as Prophyrion helped create the cosmic seed fields from which modern magnetic fields arose. “That is why I now want to investigate in more detail whether, and precisely how, giant jets produced the cosmic seed fields.”