Space is vast and full of giants: asteroids can set planets on new evolutionary paths, spinning stars, and giant galaxies. Now, a team of researchers has discovered one of the biggest discoveries yet: jets of matter traveling at nearly the speed of light away from a black hole.
At 23 million light-years long, black hole jets are the largest yet. How long is 23 million light years, you ask? It is equal to 140 Milky Ways ranked last. A study describing the jet megastructure, named Porphyrion after the giant of Greek mythology, was published today in Nature.
“We present evidence that supermassive black holes not only host their galaxies, but also the cosmic web,” said Martijn Oei, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the paper, at a press conference on Monday. Conventional knowledge held that dark jets reside “within or very close to their own galaxy,” Oei added, but Porphyrion makes it abundantly clear that the jets reach the size of large cosmic structures.
Porphyrion is a structure of the ancient plane, which started when the universe was only 6.3 billion years old (it is now almost 14 billion years old). Oei added that if Porphyrion’s jets were as wide as our planet, the black hole powering them would be the diameter of an amoeba. That’s a ridiculous ratio for widebody jets.
The jets were spotted in data from a sky survey made by Europe’s Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR. To date, more than 10,000 similar faint jet megastructures have been identified in LOFAR data, covering about 15% of the sky. The team identified Porphyrion’s source galaxy by studying data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona. Finally, observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i revealed the jet structure’s distance from Earth: about 7.5 billion light-years.
The exact conditions that produce a jet system like Porphyrion are unclear, but the research team discovered that the host black hole was emitting radiation into the atmosphere as it pulled nearby objects with its massive gravitational force.
“To create a system like Porphyrion, we have to have a very strong accretion event, perhaps a merger event with another galaxy that brings a lot of gas to feed the black hole,” Martin Hardcastle, an astronomer at the University of. Hertfordshire and the author of the paper, he said during a press conference.
Image: Martijn Oei (Caltech) / Dylan Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration). Some information is generated using AI.
“Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes are in flux, and one key feature of this is that the jets can emit large forces that affect the growth of their host galaxies and those around them,” said co-author George Djorgovski. , an astronomer at Caltech, in the agency’s release. “These findings show that their effects can go much further than we thought.”
The same team discovered the previous record-setting jet system, named Alcyoneus, which is also based on the mythical giant. That system was about 100 Milky Ways long. Besides magnetizing the universe, jets like Porphyrion and Alcyoneus emit so much energy that they can heat the intergalactic medium by a million degrees at the surface, Oei said. In addition, jets may generate and clean magnetic fields that reside in cosmic voids—the vast expanses of empty space that reside between the tendrils of the cosmic web.
“We have the idea that the universe is magnetized on many scales. “All galaxies have magnetism, as well as the threads of the cosmic web and the empty spaces between those threads,” Oei said. “People are interested in this vast universe because it might tell us something about how the universe began.”
“Any magnetic fields within them [the cosmic voids] it may be a reflection of some process in the early universe that could lead us to the words of a new physics,” he added.
New instruments like the Square Kilometer Array will provide useful ways to survey the southern sky (in their latest work, the team only scanned the northern sky). In addition, automated methods of image analysis—computer vision, for example, or other AI techniques‚ may speed up the number of black hole jet megastructures the team can find.
Right now, the team knows about 10,000, but that’s “a tiny fraction of what you can find,” Oei said, speculating that there could be anywhere between 100,000 to 1 million jet structures out there.
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