Scientists stumble upon black holes spewing largest ‘jets’ ever recorded

Imagine a black hole as an immensely powerful vacuum in space, pulling in gas, dust, and even stars.

Hard to observe by their very nature, these celestial entities exert a pull so strong no matter or light can escape once caught in their grasp.

But sometimes, instead of keeping all that stuff, the black hole shoots some of it back out at incredibly high speeds, almost as fast as light. These streams are called "jets".

Scientists have identified two of the longest black hole jets ever discovered, stretching across 140 Milky Way-sized galaxies. That's so long that it would take 23 million light years to travel from one end to the other.

These plasma jets were detected using the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope in Europe, by a research team from the California Institute of Technology in the US. The study was published in the journal Nature on September 18.

The pair of jets has been named "Porphyrion" after a giant from Greek mythology.

What shoots out these jets?

At the centre of these jets, researchers have identified a galaxy, and at the galaxy’s heart lies a supermassive black hole 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.

A supermassive black hole, like that of Porphyrion, not only consumes surrounding material but also releases enormous, blazingly bright high-energy jets that extend far beyond the galaxies themselves.

“When dust and stars fall towards the centre of a galaxy, the supermassive black hole awakens. Spinning black holes act as turbines: they convert their rotation into high-voltage electrical power. That power fuels jets that blast away at nearly the speed of light,” explains Martijn Oei, the lead author of the study.

Considering the massive scale of the Porphyrion, astrophysicists believe that jets of this size could play a significant role in shaping the evolution of the universe.

“The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions,” Oei tells the New York Times.

The Porphyrion being the largest pair of jets ever seen, with an equally vast scope of impact, the new discovery suggests that “the environmental impact of black holes extends further into space and time than previously thought,” according to Oei.

Gigantic jets like Porphyrion can spread magnetic fields across space. In this way, they shape the dynamics of the universe far beyond their immediate surroundings.

“We know magnetism pervades the cosmic web, then makes its way into galaxies and stars, and eventually to planets,” Oei tells CNN: “But the question is: Where does it start? Have these giant jets spread magnetism through the cosmos?”