At 23 million light-years long, the black hole jets are the largest yet seen.
How big is 23 million light-years, you ask?
Its the equivalent of 140 Milky Ways lined up end-to-end.
An artist’s impression of the gigantic black hole jet system extending through the cosmos.Illustration: E. Wernquist / D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration) / M. Oei
The study describing the jet megastructure, dubbed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, ispublishedtoday in Nature.
Thats the ridiculous scale of the extensive jets.
The jets were spotted in data from a sky survey made with Europes LOw Frequency ARray, or LOFAR.
An illustration and digital image showing how these jet systems extend through the cosmic web.Illustration: Martijn Oei (Caltech) / Dylan Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration). Some details were made using AI.
This discovery shows that their effects can extend much farther out than we thought.
The same team discovered the previous record-holding jet system, named Alcyoneus, also after a mythological giant.
That system was about 100 Milky Ways long.
We have observations that the universe is magnetized on many scales.
People are interested in this large-scale magnetism because it might tell us something about how the universe started out.
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Are We Inside a Black Hole?
