Astronomers have observed a massive pair of jets being ejected from a supermassive black hole 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.

The megastructure extends 23 million light years acrossmaking these black hole jets the largest ever seen, according to new research.

As CNN points out, black holes are considered the “trash of the universe,” obliterating almost anything that gets close.

However, a fraction of the material from the body that will be swallowed by the black hole is ejected before it dies, forming a jet on either side of it, said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study that describes this discovery.

The findings were published on September 18 in the journal Nature.

Black hole jets they can accelerate radiation and particles close to the speed of light, causing them to glow at wavelengths visible to radio telescopes.

Such a glow caught the attention of the astronomers behind the new study who made the discovery while surveying the sky using Europe’s LOFAR radio telescope, or ARray Low Frequency Radio Telescope, in 2018.

The newly described jets have a power equivalent to that of trillions of suns and are so massive that researchers have named them “megastructure Porphyrion» from a giant of Greek mythology.

The discovery forces astronomers to reexamine their knowledge about how massive black hole jets can be and how these giant features can affect their environment and the structure of the universe.

“A pair of jets is not only the size of a solar system or a galaxy. We are talking about 140 diameters of the Milky Way in totalOei said.

“The Milky Way would be a tiny dot in front of these two giant explosions».

Searching the cosmic web

Initially, researchers were looking for something else using it LOFAR: the famous threads of the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is the large-scale structure of the universe, a network of matter that permeates all the space between galaxies, Oei explained.

But while trying to observe the cosmic web, the team discovered large jets coming from galaxies.

In total, the team detected 10,000 new pairs of black hole jets.

A paper describing these pairs has been accepted for publication in another journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“When we first found the giant jets, we were very surprisedOei said.

“We had no idea there were so many».

Supermassive black holes are found at the centers of large galaxies. The team’s observations indicate that a growing number of galaxies have jets that reach far beyond their boundaries, Oei said.

A researcher from a different field, co-author of the study, Aivin Gast, first spotted the more massive jet pair.

At the time, Gast was an undergraduate studying classical archeology and ancient history at Oxford University.

However, due to the pandemic, his main academic work was on hold, so he offered to help Oei with a visual inspection of the images recorded by LOFAR.

“After finding Porphyrion, we were both very excited” he said, among other things, as Oei described, noting that a colleague of his felt excited to be part of the research team that detects something for the first time, he described

Once the team confirmed the galaxy the jets came from, Aivin drew on his classical studies background and suggested giving the system the beautiful name “Porphyrion,” which it now bears, he added.

Before the LOFAR observations, large jet systems were considered rare and thought to be smaller in size.

Before the set is detected Porphyrionthe largest confirmed black hole ejecta system was Alcyoneus.

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