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, after the king of giants in Greek mythology, and it spans, in total, some 7 megaparsecs across space-time. That's a whopping 23 million light-years from end to end,"Porphyrion shows that small things and large things in the Universe are intimately connected. We are seeing a single black hole that produces a structure of a scale similar to that of cosmic filaments and voids," astronomer Martijn Oei of Leiden University in the Netherlands and Caltech told ScienceAlert.
We know that, when a black hole is feeding, some of the material from the inner rim of the disk that's swirling around and falling onto the black hole gets diverted and accelerated along magnetic field lines to the poles, where it is launched into space as powerful jets of plasma and magnetic field, traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light.
The other is the length of the jets. We're peering back 7.5 billion years into the past to see Porphyrion, a time when intergalactic space was more dense than it is today. And the longer a jet grows, the more unstable it becomes. Once an instability is introduced, the jet should fall apart. How the jets of Alcyoneus and Porphyrion remained stable over such vast distances of space-time is a mystery.
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