Big Jets Challenge Cosmology

Twin jets from a black hole
are too big for theory

It’s been a hard year for cosmologists (or more accurately, a hard three decades). Now, observations of opposite-directed polar jets from a gigantic black hole are giving them surprises and headaches. And the record-setting jet streams, as wide as 140 Milky Way diameters, may not be the largest that exist, because they’ve only surveyed 15 percent of the sky on a search for these cosmic explosions.

Background: Dense, compact objects like quasars and black holes are known to blast narrow jets out their poles, perpendicular to the accretion disk, at nearly the speed of light. What’s new is the unprecedented size of this one.

Porphyrion, the longest black hole jet system yet observed. Credit: E. Wernquist / D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration) / M. Oei

Gargantuan Black Hole Jets Are Biggest Seen Yet (18 Sept 2024, Caltech News). This press release introduces Martijn Oei at Caltech, whose team made the discovery using the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) of radio telescopes in Europe. An embedded video clip tells about the find, and shows artwork of the “gargantuan” object.

“This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” says Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of a new Nature paper reporting the findings. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.“

Black hole’s jets are so huge that they may shake up cosmology (18 Sept 2024, New Scientist). They’re calling it Porphyrion, named after a Greek giant. Alex Wilkin reports:

A pair of jets blasting out of a black hole spans 23 million light years, the equivalent of 220 Milky Way galaxies in length. This is so large that it may change our understanding both of black holes and the structure of the universe.

“If you think of jets as a thing, then you could say this is the largest object that we know of in the universe,” says Martin Hardcastle at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky Ways (18 Sept 2024, Live Science). Ben Turner notes that 10,000 other jet pairs have been discovered with the LOFAR system, but Porphyrion is the largest so far. Turner feels a need to bring in the e-word, but galaxies do not follow Darwin’s type of evolution—except in the sense of blind, unguided natural processes. (Notice how he says that the evolution of this object is not understood, either.)

Supermassive black holes typically sit at the centers of galaxies, sucking in matter from their surroundings before spitting it out at extreme speeds, creating a feedback process that shapes how galaxies evolve.

But scientists still don’t fully understand how the cosmic engines and the jets they expel affect the galaxies around them.

Colossal ‘jets’ shooting from a black hole defy physicists’ theories (18 Sept 2024, Nature Podcast). Nature echoes the sentiment that this discovery runs counter to theories.

Jets are formed when matter is ionized and flung out of a black hole, creating enormous and powerful structures in space. Thought to be unstable, physicists had theorized there was a limit to how large these jets could be, but the new discovery far exceeds this, suggesting there may be more of these monstrous jets yet to be discovered.

Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web (Oei et al, Nature, 18 Sept 2024). This is the technical paper announcing the discovery. The size of this object leads his team to think that jets of this magnitude are not “young” (comparatively) but extend out to the “cosmic web,” a network of filaments that comprise the large-scale structure of the universe. If so, numerous objects like Porphyrion may have played a role, or play a role now, in the structure of the entire cosmos. That’s a monumental rethink. “How jets can retain such long-lived coherence is unknown at present.”

Search our category Space->Cosmology for more discoveries that have been challenging theory ever since “dark energy” made its debut in the late 1990s. Early mature galaxies, lack of Population III stars, and the non-discovery of dark matter come to mind.

Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” still fits the observations.

This God-honoring production can be ordered from Illustra Media. Click the photo. Quicksleeve DVDs can be ordered in bulk for ministry handouts.

Recommended Resource: Illustra DVD The Call of the Cosmos, made up of individual episodes. These episodes are also available individually at TheJohn1010Project.com for free viewing.