A Black Hole Fired Jets Spanning 140 Milky Ways
Astronomers found twin jets stretching 23 million light-years from a single black hole, the largest structure of its kind ever seen.
In 2024, astronomers announced a pair of black-hole jets so vast they dwarf entire galaxies. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant from Greek mythology, the twin outflows span 23 million light-years tip to tip, the largest such system ever recorded.
To grasp that scale, picture our own galaxy as a yardstick. You would have to line up roughly 140 Milky Ways end to end to bridge Porphyrion’s full length.
“The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions,” said study lead Martijn Oei of Caltech.
The jets erupt from a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 10 times more massive than ours, lying some 7.5 billion light-years away. That distance means the eruption happened when the universe was only about half its current age. Researchers spotted Porphyrion using Europe’s LOFAR radio telescope and published the find in the journal Nature, edging out the previous record-holder, Alcyoneus, which the same team discovered in 2022.
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