An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light- years. That is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back. Credit: E. Wernquist / D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration) / M. Oei

At 23 million light-years long, the black hole jets are the largest yet seen. How big is 23 million light-years, you ask? It’s the equivalent of 140 Milky Ways lined up end-to-end. The study describing the jet megastructure, dubbed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, is published today in Nature.

In a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have identified the longest pair of black hole jets ever observed, stretching an astonishing 23 million light-years. This monumental finding, reported in the journal Nature on September 18,

In other words, one black hole is continuously erupting energy and plasma into space across a distance more than 140 times longer than our whole galaxy, and it’s carrying the power of trillions of stars. Oei and his colleagues nicknamed the pair Porphyrion. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in those two giant eruptions,” says Oei in a statement.

The plumes stretch farther than any yet seen, reaching millions of light-years long and potentially influencing the cosmos nearby.

The largest known black hole jets, 23 million light years across, have been discovered in the distant universe. This pair of particle beams launched by a supermassive black hole is over a hundred times larger than our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Strange Universe Like a parasite sucking the life force out of its host, an international group of scientists have determined that a supermassive black hole is starving a galaxy of essential materials to make new stars.

The energetic streams are together 23 million light-years in length—roughly as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined end to end