WASHINGTON—Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite directions from a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy—the largest such jets ever spotted, extending about 140 times the diameter of our vast Milky Way galaxy.
The black hole resides at the heart of a galaxy about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles. Because of the time it takes for light to travel, looking across great distances is peering back in time, with these observations dating to when the universe was less than half its current age.
Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a large black hole at their core. Some of these shoot jets of high-energy particles and magnetic fields into space from their two poles as they devour material such as gas, dust and stars falling into them....
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