Faraway black hole unleashes record-setting energetic jets

Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite directions from a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy

Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite directions from a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy - the largest such jets ever spotted, extending about 140 times the diameter of our vast Milky Way galaxy.

The black hole resides at the heart of a galaxy about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). Because of the time it takes for light to travel, looking across great distances is peering back in time, with these observations dating to when the universe was less than half its current age.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a large black hole at their core. Some of these shoot jets of high-energy particles and magnetic fields into space from their two poles as they devour material such as gas, dust and stars falling into them due to their immense gravitational strength.

The two jet structures documented in the new study - using the LOFAR (Low-Frequency Array) radio telescope, a network of antennas centered in the Netherlands - extend 23 million light-years from end to end.

These super-heated jets, caused by the violent events around the black hole, are comprised of subatomic particles called electrons and positrons, and magnetic fields, moving at nearly the speed of light.

The researchers have nicknamed these two jets Porphyrion (pronounced poor-FEER-ee-ahn), named after a giant from ancient Greek mythology. Porphyrion is about 30% longer than the previous record-holder for such jets.

"Jet systems like Porphyrion appear to be among the most energetic spectacles that have occurred in the universe since the Big Bang," said Caltech astrophysicist Martijn Oei, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, referring to the event that initiated the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.