An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light-years. That is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back.
Porphyrion’s jets are estimated to contain the total power of trillions of suns and raise the temperature of surrounding gas by a million degrees Celsius. This means they may have inhibited the formation of not just stars but entire galaxies in the early universe. Their high-speed sprays of magnetized ejecta also could have pierced and filled voids in the cosmic web, the network of matter-rich filaments and matter-sparse cavities that forms the universe’s large-scale structure.
To better assess the impact such jets may have had on the early universe, researchers will need to create a more comprehensive catalog of the structures. The new study surveys just 15 percent of the sky, possibly leaving many more jets yet to be discovered.
E. Wernquist/D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration)/M. Oei (CC BY-NC-ND)
