Observations from the European radio telescope LOFAR have allowed scientists to discover Porphyrion: A megajet structure emanating from a black holewhich measures 23 million light years, the equivalent of aligning 140 galaxies like the Milky Way.
Described in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, the largest jet system ever discovered, dates back to a time when the universe was 6.3 billion years old, less than half its current age of 13.8 billion years.
These gigantic flows, with a total power equivalent to billions of suns, emerge above and below a black hole. supermassive and expel hot plasma beyond the remote galaxy from which they emerge.
The new megastructure has been named after the mythical giant Porphyrion: “The Milky Way looks like a tiny dot next to it,” said one of the authors of the discovery, Martijn Oei, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Porphyrion contains more than 8,000 pairs of jets.
To gauge the enormous dimensions of these two systems, it is enough to consider that the jets of Centaurus A, the closest to Earth, would measure in an aligned manner about ten times the extension of the Milky Way.
Origin of Porphyrion
To locate the galaxy in which Porphyrion originated, researchers turned to observations from the Giant Metal-Wave Radio Telescope in India, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The analyses, supported by artificial intelligence, placed the origin of the jets in a galaxy with a mass ten times greater than the Milky Way, located 7.5 billion light years from Earth.
Porphyrion would have emerged, according to researchers, from what is called an active black hole in radiative modein which the gravitational forces of the material around it pull the hole heats up and emits energy in the form of radiation or jets.
Researchers believe that the discovery of these two large jet systems may indicate that there are many more colossal jets yet to be found: “We may be seeing the tip of the iceberg; our study only covered 15% of the sky,” Oei said in a university statement.
A “casual” discovery
Caltech researchers began using LOFAR telescope observations in 2018, not to study the jets emanating from black holes but rather the cosmic network of wispy filaments that traverse the space between galaxies.
As they studied the images looking for these filaments, they came across several surprisingly long jet systems: “When we discovered the giant jets we were stunned, we had no idea there could be so many.“, explains Oei.
The discovery of Porphyrion would suggest that these giant jet systems may have influenced the formation of galaxies in the early universe more than previously thought, since these megastructures spread enormous amounts of energy that affect the growth of their host galaxies and other nearby galaxies.
Questions to be answered
The next challenge for researchers is better understand how these jet systems influence their environment, with their ability to scatter cosmic raysheat, heavy atoms, and magnetic fields throughout the space between galaxies.
Oei is particularly interested in finding out to what extent the giant jets spread magnetism: “The magnetism of our planet allows life to thrive, so we want to understand how it arose.”
Scientists are also puzzled by how these jet systems can extend so far beyond their host galaxies without becoming destabilized.
FEW (EFE, Caltech, Astronomy and Astrophysics)