Scientists Uncover Record-Breaking Jets Blasting from a Supermassive Black Hole

Scientists discovered the longest jets streaming out of a black hole in a distant galaxy.

The jets that shoot hot plasma are among the largest ever seen – they’re about 140 Milky Way galaxies stacked end-to-end.

Eileen Meyer who is a black hole researcher at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, but was not involved with the study, said: “This one managed to achieve a size so large.”

The journal Nature reported on the discovery made by using images taken from a European radio telescope.

Most space debris falls into black holes. Heated plasma can sometimes escape in the form of thin, high-energy jets.

Jets can be destroyed by space turbulence, or starved of matter if they are not fed soon after creation. Jets can grow supersized from supermassive Black Holes.

The combined jets of a supermassive, far-off black hole measure around 23 million light years. This is about 7 million more light-years than the previous record holder. Light-years are 5.8 trillion miles.

Martijn Oei, co-author of the study, said that researchers didn’t expect to find such long black hole jets at this early stage in the history of the universe. The jets are from when the universe was only half as old as it is now.

Oei, from the California Institute of Technology, believes that studying the jets can reveal if they played a role in the creation of the early universe.