NASA’s IXPE mission includes an X-ray telescope that will help us learn more about black holes, but astronomers at Western Sydney University didn’t need that tool to find one of the largest black hole jets ever in the sky. Located 93 million light-years from Earth in the galaxy NGC2663, CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a network of 36 linked radio dishes forming a super telescope, observed a stream of material that is 50-times larger than the Milky Way galaxy.
Upon closer inspection, they discovered a phenomena that resembles shock diamonds generated by a jet engine. The shock diamonds you see in NGC2663 means that there is enough matter around the galaxy to push against the sides of the jet. In other words, intergalactic matter is fed into a galaxy, which then makes a black hole and launches a jet. This black hole jet slows the supply of intergalactic matter into galaxies and affects how gas forms into galaxies as the universe evolves.
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One possibility is that the physics of the jet is not determined by the size of the disc, but instead by the speed, temperature and other properties of particles at the jet’s base,” said Poshak Gandhi, lead author of the study and astronomer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
