At 23 million light-years long, the black hole jets are the largest yet seen. How big is 23 million light-years, you ask? It’s the equivalent of 140 Milky Ways lined up end-to-end. The study describing the jet megastructure, dubbed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, is published today in Nature.

The largest known black hole jets, 23 million light years across, have been discovered in the distant universe. This pair of particle beams launched by a supermassive black hole is over a hundred times larger than our galaxy, the Milky Way.

One key characteristic of a supermassive black hole is the duo of the extragalactic jets of material that form around its axis of rotation. A new study reveals that one such pair of jets, belonging to a black hole some 7.