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.
