Science & Technology (Commonwealth Union) _ Researchers have discovered a pair of enormous jets blasting out from a distant black hole, spanning an astonishing 23 million light years—about 220 times the length of our own Milky Way galaxy. This mind-boggling scale, named Porphyrion by the team of researchers, could potentially rewrite our understanding of black holes and the overall structure of the universe.
Martin Hardcastle from the University of Hertfordshire, UK, has led the team in investigating these cosmic behemoths using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of thousands of radio antennas spread across Europe. “If you think of jets as a single entity, this is the largest object we know of in the universe,” says Hardcastle. The light that reveals these jets to us now left its source 7.5 billion years ago, when the universe was only 6.3 billion years old—just over half its current age.
Porphyrion’s jets emanate from a black hole located in a galaxy billions of light years away. To put the scale into perspective, these jets are so massive that their discovery could challenge current astrophysical theories on how black holes interact with the universe at large. Such extreme forces could even reshape our knowledge about the universe’s magnetic fields and how galaxies form and evolve.
These colossal black hole jets didn’t just appear overnight. According to Hardcastle, the black hole responsible must have been consuming the equivalent of a sun’s worth of matter every year for about a billion years. The black hole’s magnetic field twists and accelerates matter as it draws it into its core, ejecting it outward at nearly the speed of light. This continuous outflow of energy is what created the jets that now span millions of light years.
Compared to today, the early universe had much closer-packed matter. This proximity would typically result in frequent collisions or disturbances from other cosmic bodies. But Porphyrion’s jets seem to have persisted uninterrupted for a billion years, a feat that astounds scientists like Hardcastle. “This period in the universe was marked by intense activity, yet somehow, this black hole has managed to keep firing away for so long without being disturbed,” he explains.
Laura Olivera-Nieto from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany shares her astonishment, stating, “I would have thought something like this was impossible simply because it seems too big to have maintained the jet for so long.” She highlights that even attempting to simulate this phenomenon is challenging. The distances and scales involved are far beyond what our current computational models can easily handle. “It’s truly a challenge to try to understand how this is physically possible. We cannot put it in a computer, it’s too big,” she says.
What’s more, the size and energy of these jets could have broader implications for how other galaxies form. Hardcastle suggests that the Porphyrion jets could be injecting energy and magnetic fields into distant regions of the universe, potentially influencing galactic formation on a vast scale. “It dumps energy, magnetic fields, and particles into the voids between the galaxies,” he says. This process could be a key in solving the long-standing mystery of where the universe’s magnetic fields originate.
Such an enormous outflow from a black hole could challenge established cosmological theories that assume black holes are more isolated entities with limited influence beyond their immediate surroundings. “A result like this shows that to fully understand the universe’s large-scale structure, we need to also think about how smaller systems—like the black hole systems responsible for such jets—impact its development,” says Olivera-Nieto.
In other words, Porphyrion has revealed a connection between the universe’s smallest and largest scales. These black hole jets could influence how galaxies and cosmic structures form, potentially reshaping the large-scale layout of the universe itself. This discovery opens up new pathways for understanding not just black holes, but the very fabric of the cosmos.
Researchers will have to rethink fundamental questions about how black holes interact with the universe around them as they continue to study Porphyrion and other similar phenomena. These jets, stretching across incomprehensible distances, may hold the answers to some of the universe’s most enduring mysteries, including the role of magnetic fields in shaping its structure. One thing is certain: Porphyrion is changing the way we view the cosmos, and its mysteries have only just begun to unfold.
