Plasma Jets Shooting Out Of Massive Black Hole Are Largest Ever Seen

Astronomers believe that the massive plasma jets date back to a time when our universe was just 6.3 billion years old, a few billion years before the Earth was even formed.

Currently, our universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, meaning Porphyrion has been blasting outwards for about half of our universe’s existence.

Plasma jets occur following a black hole’s consumption of the matter it attracts, in which the black hole then blasts a stream of electrically charged subatomic particles perpendicular to its axis of rotation.

Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and author of the discovery’s research paper, reveals that the size of Porphyrion makes our galaxy seem insignificant by comparison.

“This pair is not just the size of a solar system or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” says Oei. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.”

Prior to the discovery of Porphyrion, the largest recorded plasma jets was Alcyoneus, which is measured at the size of 100 Milky Way Galaxies, discovered in 2022 by the same team of astronomers that found Porphyrion.

Plasma jets have been a known cosmic phenomenon for over 100 years, but until recently, astronomers thought them to be somewhat rare and smaller in scope.

With the new groundbreaking findings, astronomers now believe that these enormous plasma jets could have possibly had a much larger impact on the forming of galaxies in our universe’s early days than what was previously thought.

George Djorgovski is a professor of astronomy and data science at Caltech and co-author of the research paper. He claims researching the function of these massive plasma jets is key to understanding the development of galaxies.

“Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve, and one key aspect of this is that jets can spread huge amounts of energy that affect the growth of their host galaxies and other galaxies near them,” says Djorgovski.

“This discovery shows that their effects can extend much farther out than we thought.”

The discovery of the Porphyrion plasma jet system was made possible during a recent sky survey when astronomers uncovered over 10,000 new jet systems, more than ever thought possible.

The team of astronomers utilized a low-frequency array radio telescope, also known as LOFAR, which was constructed in the Netherlands and seven other European countries.

After making the initial discovery, the team of astronomers used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii to locate the plasma jets within a galaxy 10 times more massive than the Milky Way and about 7.5 billion light years from Earth.

According to Oei, the team’s discovery has refocused efforts on locating evidence of similar giant plasma jets that once existed in the past, which could have created a “cosmic web” during the formation of galaxies. “This is what we want to go after now,” he says.

Source: Phys.org