Astronomers have discovered the largest known black hole jets, stretching an astonishing 23 million light-years. To put it in perspective, that’s the length of 140 Milky Way galaxies aligned end-to-end.

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.

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.

Scientists have found the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen. Such jets are vast blasts of radiation and particles that erupt out of supermassive black holes. Milky Way jets are the largest galaxy-made structures in the universe.

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,

Astronomers have found the largest black hole jets ever recorded, spanning 23 million light-years and potentially influencing the formation of galaxies across the cosmic web.