Posted on by Mark Thompson

Astronomers Find the Longest Black Hole Jets Ever Seen

An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed.

Black holes often appear in science fiction movies, largely because elements of their existence are still a mystery. They have fascinating impacts on the surrounding region of space too with distortions in space and time high on the list. A team of astronomers have found a supermassive black hole with twin jets blasting out an incredible 23 million light years, the longest yet. To put this into context, if you lined up 140 Milky Way galaxies side by side, then that’s the length of the jet! 

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Posted on by Matt Williams

Supermassive Black Holes In Distant Galaxies Are Mysteriously Aligned

A supermassive black hole has been found in an unusual spot: an isolated region of space where only small, dim galaxies reside. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A team of astronomers from South Africa have noticed a series of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies that are all spinning in the same direction. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In 1974, astronomers detected a massive source of radio wave emissions coming from the center of our galaxy. Within a few decades time, it was concluded that the radio wave source corresponded to a particularly large, spinning black hole. Known as Sagittarius A, this particular black hole is so large that only the designation “supermassive” would do. Since its discovery, astronomers have come to conclude that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) lie at the center of almost all of the known massive galaxies.

But thanks to a recent radio imaging by a team of researchers from the University of Cape Town and University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, it has been further determined that in a region of the distant universe, the SMBHs are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction. This finding, which shows an alignment of the jets of galaxies over a large volume of space, is the first of its kind, and could tell us much about the early Universe.

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