Scientists detect longest pair of jets streaming from a supermassive black hole

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Scientists have discovered the longest pair of jets streaming from a black hole in a distant galaxy.

The jets shooting hot plasma are the largest ever spotted – about as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up end-to-end.

“This one has managed to reach a size that’s so big,” said Eileen Meyer, who studies black holes at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and who was not involved in the study.

The discovery, made using images from a European radio telescope, was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Black holes eat most space debris that falls their way. Sometimes, heated-up plasma makes a narrow escape by spewing out in thin, high-energy jets.

The jets can break apart soon after their creation, jostled by space turbulence or starved in the absence of new matter. But jets from supermassive black holes can become supersized.

The latest combined jets from a faraway supermassive black hole are around 23 million light-years long. That’s about 7 million light-years longer than the previous recordholder. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

Study co-author Martijn Oei said researchers weren’t expecting to find long black hole jets so early in the universe’s history. The jets date back to when the universe was less than half its current age.

Studying the jets could reveal whether they had an influence on how the early universe came to be, said Oei with the California Institute of Technology.

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