"The New York Times reports that astronomers have [1]discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space (source paywalled; [2]alternative source )," writes longtime Slashdot reader [3]fahrbot-bot . From the report:

> Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky -- about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy. Follow-up observations with optical telescopes traced the eruption to a galaxy 7.5 billion light-years away that existed when the universe was less than half its current age of 14 billion years. At the heart of that galaxy was a black hole spewing energy equivalent to the output of more than a trillion stars.

>

> "The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions," said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Oei led the team that made the discovery, which was [4]reported in Nature on Sept. 18 and announced on the journal's cover with an illustration reminiscent of a "Star Wars" poster. The astronomers have named the black hole Porphyrion, after a giant in Greek mythology -- a son of Gaia -- who fought the gods and lost. The discovery raises new questions of how such black holes could affect the evolution and structure of the universe.



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/science/space/black-hole-m87-energy.html

[2] https://www.space.com/black-hole-jets-longest-23-million-light-years

[3] https://slashdot.org/~fahrbot-bot

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07879-y