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Black holes burp. A lot. And we think these burps have a huge impact on how the Universe has evolved. If there’s a strong magnetic field around the black hole, that burp material can get funnelled up and away into a really tight jet. And these jets end up being way bigger than the entire galaxy that we find a black hole in. For example, this galaxy Hercules A is a really famous example of this, with jets than span almost a million light years. But this month, a team of astronomers, Oei and collaborators, reported finding the longest black hole jet ever seen at 23 million light years long. It is HUGE. And while it’s very cool to find the longest or biggest of something out there in the universe, this discovery also has big implications for how the Universe has evolved and galaxies grow. So in this video we’re going to chat about, 1) how Oei and collaborators found this giant black hole jet, Porphyrion, 2) the properties of Porphyrion, and how it compares to all the other black hole jets they found, and 3) what effect black hole jets of this size could have on the universe around them.

Oei et al. (2024; Porphyrion discovery paper) – https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
Oei et al. (2022; previous largest jet known) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.05427
Mostert et al. (2024; more than 8000 jets found in LOFAR) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.00232
Correa et al. (2021; cosmic void size distribution) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.12064

00:00 – Introduction
02:50 – AD – Ground News
04:25 – How they found these jets?
07:11 – How do they compare to other jets?
11:00 – How do these jets effect the Universe around them?
15:21 – Bloopers

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📚 My book, “A Brief History of Black Holes”, out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky

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🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive

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