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Beyond Imagination: 140 Milky Ways Spanned by Record-Breaking Black Hole Jets




Astronomers have identified the largest black hole jet structure known, named Porphyrion, stretching 23 million light-years across, akin to 140 Milky Way galaxies aligned.

This discovery, emerging from a galaxy about 10 times the mass of our Milky Way, suggests that such jets could significantly impact galaxy formation and cosmic magnetic fields.

Discovery of Colossal Black Hole Jets

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That’s equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.

“This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” says Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of a new Nature paper reporting the findings. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.”



Unveiling Porphyrion: A Record-Breaking Jet System

The jet megastructure, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, dates to a time when our universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. These fierce outflows with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns shoot out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a remote galaxy.

Prior to Porphyrion’s discovery, the largest confirmed jet system was Alcyoneus, also named after a giant in Greek mythology. Alcyoneus, which was discovered in 2022 by the same team that found Porphyrion, spans the equivalent of around 100 Milky Ways. For comparison, the well-known Centaurus A jets (see image below), the closest major jet system to Earth, spans 10 Milky Ways.



Broader Implications for Cosmic Evolution

The latest finding suggests that these giant jet systems may have had a larger influence on the formation of galaxies in the young universe than previously believed. Porphyrion existed during an early epoch when the wispy filaments that connect and feed galaxies, known as the cosmic web, were closer together than they are now. That means enormous jets like Porphyrion reached across a greater portion of the cosmic web compared to jets in the local universe.

The LOFAR Survey: A Sky Full of Giants

The Porphyrion jet system is the biggest found so far during a sky survey that has revealed a shocking number of the faint megastructures: more than 10,000. This massive population of gargantuan jets was found using Europe’s LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) radio telescope.

While hundreds of large jet systems were known before the LOFAR observations, they were thought to be rare and on average smaller in size than the thousands of systems uncovered by the radio telescope.

“Giant jets were known before we started the campaign, but we had no idea that there would turn out to be so many,” says Martin Hardcastle, second author of the study and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in England. “Usually when we get a new observational capability, such as LOFAR’s combination of wide field of view and very high sensitivity to extended structures, we find something new, but it was still very exciting to see so many of these objects emerging.”

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

#HighEnergyPhysics#ParticlePhysics#QuantumPhysics#AstroparticlePhysics#ColliderPhysics#HiggsBoson#LHC#QuantumFieldTheory#NeutrinoPhysics#PhysicsResearch#ComputationalScience#DataScience#ScientificComputing#NumericalMethods#HighPerformanceComputing#MachineLearningInScience#BigData#AlgorithmDevelopment#SimulationScience#ParallelComputing



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