The Largest 'Black Hole Jet' Discovered Is Estimated to Be Twice the Size of Our Milky Way

We know black holes to be mysterious regions in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that even light can't escape. Over the years, scientists have discovered several black holes in our observable universe and in February 2025, astronomers spotted yet another fascinating spatial phenomenon called a "black hole jet," according to Space. The jet, which is a powerful stream of charged particles and energy, was seen blasting out of a supermassive black hole. The jet is estimated to be twice the size of our Milky Way.

The humongous stream of particles and energy stretched 200,000 light-years and was found shooting out of a quasar when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old. The black hole in its core is not as large as experts thought it was and it challenged what was previously known about these black hole jets. The quasar, designated as J1601+3102, has a mass of 450 million suns and is relatively smaller compared to a quasar powered by a black hole. 

"Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars. This seems to indicate that you don’t necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early universe," Anniek Gloudemans, team leader and a researcher at NOIRLab, explained per the outlet. The recent discovery suggested that shortly after the formation of the universe, it was possibly filled with more of such jets which were powered by quasars.

These jets were visible from far away using radio telescopes. This particular jet erupting from J1601+3102 was first discovered by the international Low-Frequency ARray (LOFAR) Telescope, a network of radio telescopes based across Europe. The detection of the jet was then studied using the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) and the Hobby Eberly Telescope attempted to observe it in visible light.

"We were searching for quasars with strong radio jets in the early universe, which helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies," Gloudemans continued. "It's only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away." ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ

The research on the black hole jets was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and the team of astronomers discovered that one of the jet streams was shorter and brighter than its counterpart. It was deduced that the environmental extremities around the supermassive black hole were affecting these jets.

"When we started looking at this object, we were expecting the southern jet to just be an unrelated nearby source and for most of it to be small. That made it quite surprising when the LOFAR image revealed large, detailed radio structures," team member Frits Sweijen from Durham University, said. "The nature of this distant source makes it difficult to detect at higher radio frequencies, demonstrating the power of LOFAR on its own and its synergies with other instruments."