The largest-ever black hole jets ever seen hint that these cosmic monsters may play an even more significant role in shaping galaxies than previously thought.

In other words, one black hole is continuously erupting energy and plasma into space across a distance more than 140 times longer than our whole galaxy, and it’s carrying the power of trillions of stars. Oei and his colleagues nicknamed the pair Porphyrion. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in those two giant eruptions,” says Oei in a statement.

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.