Scientists discover blazing black holes of distant galaxies spouting jets up to 50 times wider than our Milky Way: ‘Phenomenal’

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Indian astronomers have discovered a cluster of quasars that spout jets of matter that extend out for 7.2 million light-years — many times bigger than our own galaxy.

The mind-bending study was published late last month in the Astrophysical Journal.

“We are talking about 20 to 50 Milky Way diameters placed side by side,” team member Souvik Manik, a researcher from Midnapore City College who was part of the team that discovered the intergalactic congregation, said in a statement, per Space.com.

The crack squad discovered the interstellar anomaly using data collected by the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located near Pune, India.

The luminous entities, known as Giant Radio Quasars, are part of a gang of 369 quasars uncovered by the Indian team.

What is a quasar?

Quasars are the extremely bright cores of active galaxies — ones in which a central black hole is gobbling large amounts of matter — that are located in the distant universe.

Said supermassive dark vortex expands rapidly by gobbling up large amounts of gas. Because the matter can’t enter the hole at the same time, it forms a line as an “accretion” disk, which becomes extremely hot — millions of degrees — and emits all the light.

Some of the material in the disk is also diverted away from the black hole to form a luminous collimated jet. When combined with the disk, this makes the core of the galaxy shine so brightly that it’s visible from across the universe — like a celestial beacon.

In fact, these jets often expand into wide plumes or “lobes” that fan out far above and below their host galaxies. The jets and lobes are accompanied by strong radio wave emissions — hence the name Giant Radio Quasars.

Despite their size and luminescence, finding these intergalactic giants isn’t easy.

Team leader Sabyasachi Pal, an astronomer at Midnapore City College, said that spotting these phenomena is difficult because a faint “bridge” of emissions that links the two lobes often flies under the radar, making them seem incomplete.

Interestingly, the team noticed that at least 14% of quasars seem to occur in galaxy groupings or the bodies of matter from which they originate. In addition, the further the quasars were from the Milky Way, the more distorted and asymmetrical their jets.

One theory is that these far-flung quasars are situated further back in time, when the cosmos was filled with denser gas and other obstacles that distorted their trajectory.

In either case, the discovery helps shed important light on the cosmic phenomenon.

“Their enormous radio jets make these quasars valuable for understanding both the late stages of their evolution and the intergalactic medium in which they expand, the tenuous gas that confines their radio lobes millions of light-years from the central black hole,” said Pal.

One space enthusiast was wowed, writing on X: “Phenomenal Just a wide jet itself is an oddity.”