A giant black hole spews out radiation at a record high

The universe the most withdrawn subjects can express themselves very spectacularly.

The black hole at the center of a distant galaxy emits jets of plasma no less than 23 million light-years long. They are longer than previously observed.

The length of the showers corresponds to the diameter of a couple of hundred Milky Ways, and their energy is millions of millions of Suns.

Two jets leave the galaxy in both directions. The shower comes from the boiling and heating matter around the black hole.

Pocket galaxies The Milky Way would be a small dot inside these jets, says the lead author of the study Martijn Oops in the bulletin.

He works at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech.

A study by Oei’s group was published In the journal Nature.

Observed in the study the galaxy is about 7.5 billion light years away. The universe was 6.3 billion years old at that time.

Oei’s team named the observed jets Porphyrion, a reference to the giant of ancient Greek mythology. The home galaxy of the black hole that created the jets is about ten times the size of the Milky Way.

When Porphyrion glowed at its longest, the cosmic web connecting the galaxies, as it were, was denser than it is today. Therefore, the jet in the universe at that time extended relatively even wider than a similar jet would extend today.

“Spotted the jet is interesting in many ways, as it helps to explain, for example, the origin of cosmic magnetic fields,” says the assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Helsinki Joonas Nättila.

Nättilä was not involved in Oei’s group’s research, but he was recently modeled black hole radiation First in the world at the University of Helsinki.

“An interesting observation is that no jet has been observed in our own galaxy. The reason is unknown,” Nättilä points out.

According to him, the observation further increases the reflection on what keeps the shower together for so long.

“The phenomenon is a bit similar to if you sprayed water with a fire hose, and the spray would stay in a pile tens of kilometers away.”

Galaxies the black holes at the centers could emit enormous amounts of energy that affected the growth of their home galaxies and nearby galaxies.

Massive jets have been able to influence the formation of galaxies in the young universe more significantly than has been thought.

Oei’s group has previously observed record jets of black holes. For example, in 2022, there was talk of a shower that was about a hundred times the length of the Milky Way.

The closest to Earth, about 11–13 million light years away, is also observed shower in the galaxy Centaurus A. It is ten Milky Ways across.

Oei’s group has used a European Promising radio telescopes network. In it, several thousand antennas can be combined to correspond to one large telescope.

The group the observations only cover fifteen percent of the starry sky. Since most giant jets of radiation are difficult to detect, he believes that there are several giants hiding in space.

“Are perhaps they have only seen the tip of the iceberg”, says Oei in the announcement.

Next, Oei and his group want to find out how massive phenomena like Porphyrion affect space. They spread radiation, heat and magnetic fields into intergalactic space.

Magnetic fields in particular are of interest to researchers, because thanks to them there is also life on Earth. The Earth’s magnetic field partly protects us from space radiation.