The vastness of space presents us with many "ooh-ahh" opportunities. Here’s a new one: a massive jet of material. It’s been named Porphyrion by its discoverers Martin Oei and colleagues from 5 nations. They used optical images from the Keck telescope on Hawaii and detailed it with a giant radio telescope at Pune, India.
The jet was shot out by a supermassive black hole around 5 billion years ago. It now extends about 7 million parsecs or 23 million light years. A light year is 60,000 times the distance from the Sun to Earth, so we’re talking about something huge. This is the largest structure of material seen. It’s 2/3 as large as the huge gaps between galaxies, the cosmic void radius. Its staying intact as a narrow beam of material over such a great distance surprised the research team. When the Universe was that young it was 7 to 15 times denser than it is now. The jet was not scattered into a broad spray. It was not destabilized into wild wiggles by what are called magnetohydrodynamic instabilities.
To use the huge body of physical theory to explain such stability over the great distance is 100-fold beyond the capability of current computations. We can’t see this jet by eye or backyard telescope but we can use up some of our reserve of awe at Nature.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Nature, 19 Sept. 2024, pp. 537 ff.
