Black hole jets on the scale of the Cosmic Web
Abstract
Jets launched by supermassive black holes transport relativistic leptons, magnetic fields, and atomic nuclei from the centres of galaxies to their outskirts and beyond. These outflows embody the most energetic pathway by which galaxies respond to their Cosmic Web environment. Studying black hole feedback is an astrophysical frontier, providing insights on star formation, galaxy cluster stability, and the origin of cosmic rays, magnetism, and heavy elements throughout the Universe. This feedback's cosmological importance is ultimately bounded by the reach of black hole jets, and could be sweeping if jets travel far at early epochs. Here we present the joint LOFAR-uGMRT-Keck discovery of a black hole jet pair extending over megaparsecs -- the largest galaxy-made structure ever found. The outflow, seen gigayears into the past, spans two-thirds of a typical cosmic void radius, thus penetrating voids at probability. This system demonstrates that jets can avoid destruction by magnetohydrodynamical instabilities over cosmological distances, even at epochs when the Universe was 15 to 7 times denser than it is today. Whereas previous record-breaking outflows were powered by radiatively inefficient active galactic nuclei, this outflow is powered by a radiatively efficient active galactic nucleus, a type common at early epochs. If, as implied, a population of early void-penetrating outflows existed, then black hole jets could have overwritten the fields from primordial magnetogenesis. This outflow shows that energy transport from supermassive black holes operates on scales of the Cosmic Web and raises the possibility that cosmic rays and magnetism in the intergalactic medium have a non-local, cross-void origin.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2411.08630,
title = {Black hole jets on the scale of the Cosmic Web},
author = {Martijn S. S. L. Oei and Martin J. Hardcastle and Roland Timmerman and Aivin R. D. J. G. I. B. Gast and Andrea Botteon and Antonio C. Rodriguez and Daniel Stern and Gabriela Calistro Rivera and Reinout J. van Weeren and Huub J. A. Röttgering and Huib T. Intema and Francesco de Gasperin and S. G. Djorgovski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.08630},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
30 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, published in Nature. This arXiv version pre-dates the peer review process