Extra large Black hole An astrophysical jet fired into space has created the largest structure ever seen in a galaxy.
It was named PorphyrionNamed after the king of the giants in Greek mythology, it spans approximately 7 megaparsecs across space-time, or a whopping 23 million light-years from end to end. Makes it an important part of the cosmic web. Connecting the universe.
“Porphyrion shows that the small and the large in the universe are intimately connected. We are seeing a single black hole creating structures on a scale similar to cosmic filaments and voids,” Martin Oye, an astronomer at Leiden University and Caltech in the Netherlands, told ScienceAlert.
“If you were to shrink the jet to the size of the Earth and shrink the black hole accordingly, the black hole would be about 0.2 millimeters across. That’s the size of an amoeba or a tick on your skin. So this huge jet is amazing. It’s as if a single amoeba can generate a powerful fountain of energy the size of the entire Earth!”
It’s a surprising discovery, and raises many questions, because it’s not an anomaly. It follows Alcyoneus, a galaxy with a jet spanning 16 million light years. That is, the component that produces the ‘impossible’ black hole jet is so large that we think it shouldn’t exist, but it may actually be quite normal in the universe.
Astrophysical jets being created Black hole It has a formation mechanism that we do not understand well.
We know that when a black hole absorbs, some of the material on the inner edge of the disk orbits the black hole, falls, changes direction, and accelerates along the magnetic field lines toward the poles. From there, it is shot out into space as powerful plasma and magnetic jets, traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Jets like these are all over the universe. Supermassive black holes feed and grow as they explode, and jets are a natural result. But the jets of Alcyoneus and Porphyrion present a number of challenges.
First, to produce such a massive jet, the black hole would have to constantly feed itself with material for about a billion years, meaning it would have to have a huge amount of material stored up. This is unusual, but if you look at the results, it’s not impossible.
The other is the length of the jet. We’re looking at Porphyrion, 7.5 billion years ago. At that time, intergalactic space was denser than it is today. And the longer the jet, the more unstable it becomes. Once instability is introduced, the jet will collapse.
“Pen-and-paper work and numerical simulations of jet physics show that jets are unstable structures. Once a disturbance occurs, it tends to grow rather than diminish,” Oei said.
“Eventually, the jet will break apart. So these (magneto)hydrodynamic instabilities and the jet’s limited fuel life (which could be billions of years!) will set a rough ‘upper limit’ to jet growth, although it is not clear exactly where that limit is.”
It is a mystery how the jets of Alcyoneus and Porphyrion remained stable over such vast spans of space and time.
But they can give us clues about how the universe is structured: a structure that spans all the ages of space-time, a vast system called the Cosmic Web. filamentComposed of ~ dark matter Gravitationally binding galaxies together, the hubs of galaxy clusters where these filaments meet, and the giant air gap Between filaments.
The team’s calculations suggest that Porphyrion’s jet is about 66 percent of its radius. The emptiness where Porphyrion was sitting at that time.
This suggests that these giant jets may be playing a role in shaping the web of space. The researchers say that they may be responsible for the unusually high temperatures detected in the void and the magnetic field structures found there. These features may have been placed by the jets.
This is particularly interesting because black holes are a fairly common type of black hole in the early universe: radiation-active black holes that produce large amounts of radiation. This could mean that there were many more massive jets in the early universe than we realize, and that they played a significant role in sculpting the web of the universe.
The research team believes that the universe may have been filled with such galaxies much later.
“I think galaxies with giant jets are much more common than we thought,” Oei said.
“As giant jet systems get larger, they become more difficult to observe. They are also harder to observe further out in space. Therefore, the number of giant jets detected at present is limited by our instrumentation capabilities. We expect to find more galaxies with giant jets in the coming years as instrumentation improves.”
And I hope that through this, we can find answers to these difficult and beautiful questions.
The team’s research was published in: nature.
