Astronomers have seen the largest pair of a black hole Jets that have ever been seen – with a length of 23 million light years, they are 140 long the neck The stars stayed at the end.
The supermassive jet pair, named Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, are enormous beams of light that burst out of the black hole at speeds close to light. Their origin is a supermassive black hole 7.5 billion light-years from Earth, from which they exploded with the energy of billions of stars.
The jets were found among 10,000 others in a survey by the European Low Frequency Array (PROMISES) radio telescope. By studying the flow of these giant waters, scientists hope to understand how they created the early universe as we see it today. The researchers published their findings on Sept. 17 in the newspaper Nature.
“This pair is not the size of the solar system, or the Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” the study’s lead author said. Martinijn Oopspostdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Caltech, said in an emailed statement. “The Milky Way would be a small speck in two volcanoes.”
Supermassive black holes often reside at the center of galaxies, absorbing material from their surroundings before spitting it out at extreme speeds, creating a feedback loop that shapes how galaxies evolve.
But scientists still do not fully understand how the engines of the universe and the jets they drive affect the galaxies around them.
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To better answer that question, researchers searched for the black hole’s hidden jets by scanning LOFAR radio images, using machine learning tools and citizen scientists to help identify any jets they missed.
Once they saw the first signs of large wisps of Porphyrion gas, the researchers turned to the latest observations using India. A large Metrowave radio telescope (GMRT) and A Spectroscopic Instrument of Dark Energy (DESI) Arizona traces the origin of the jets to a massive galaxy about 10 times the size of the Milky Way.
Further observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii revealed Porphyrion’s exact location and showed that its droplets are spread along the vast tracts of filaments that connect and feed the galaxies, known as the cosmic web. .
Oei said: “Until now, these large jet systems seemed to be a strange phenomenon in the modern universe. “If distant jets like this can reach the scale of the cosmic web, then every region of the universe may be affected by black hole activity at some point in the universe’s time.”
The enormous size of Porphyrion – about 40 Milky Ways larger than the previously known largest. a jet formation called Alcyoneus – suggests that the belching of supermassive black holes played a much more important role in the formation of the modern universe than previously thought.
The porphyrion also emerged from a type of black hole common in the early universe but was not previously thought to produce massive jets, meaning that this massive outburst may be lurking in the first universe.
“We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg,” Oei said. “Our LOFAR survey covered only 15 percent of the sky. And most of these large jets are likely to be difficult to see, so we believe there are many more. of the behemoths out there.”
The researchers’ next steps will be to investigate how the giant jets formed the early universe as they spewed out? cosmic rays, heavy atoms, heat and gravity across galaxies.
“Our planet’s magnetism allows life to thrive, so we want to understand how it came to be,” Oei said. “We know that magnetism spreads through the cosmic web, then into galaxies and galaxies, and finally to the planets, but the question is: Where does it start?
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