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Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web

Nature volume 633, pages 537–541 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

When sustained for megayears (refs. 1,2), high-power jets from supermassive black holes (SMBHs) become the largest galaxy-made structures in the Universe3. By pumping electrons, atomic nuclei and magnetic fields into the intergalactic medium (IGM), these energetic flows affect the distribution of matter and magnetism in the cosmic web4,5,6 and could have a sweeping cosmological influence if they reached far at early epochs. For the past 50 years, the known size range of black hole jet pairs ended at 4.6–5.0 Mpc (refs. 7,8,9), or 20–30% of a cosmic void radius in the Local Universe10. An observational lack of longer jets, as well as theoretical results11, thus suggested a growth limit at about 5 Mpc (ref. 12). Here we report observations of a radio structure spanning about 7 Mpc, or roughly 66% of a coeval cosmic void radius, apparently generated by a black hole between \({4.4}_{-0.7}^{+0.2}\) and 6.3 Gyr after the Big Bang. The structure consists of a northern lobe, a northern jet, a core, a southern jet with an inner hotspot and a southern outer hotspot with a backflow. This system demonstrates that jets can avoid destruction by magnetohydrodynamical instabilities over cosmological distances, even at epochs when the Universe was 7 to \(1{5}_{-2}^{+6}\) times denser than it is today. How jets can retain such long-lived coherence is unknown at present.

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Fig. 1: Deep radio images of a 7-Mpc-long, black-hole-driven outflow.
Fig. 2: Radio close-up of the centre of Porphyrion.
Fig. 3: Rest-frame ultraviolet–optical spectroscopy and radio–ultraviolet photometry of the host galaxy.
Fig. 4: Measurements overlaid on evolutionary tracks from dynamical modelling.

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Data availability

The LoTSS DR2 is publicly available68. The authors share this work’s proprietary LOFAR, uGMRT and Keck I telescope data, as well as the dynamical model runs and LoTSS–VLASS spectral indices, through Code Ocean.

Code availability

The dynamical model used to interpret the outflow is described by Hardcastle28 and available for download69. Analysis and plotting code specific to this work is available on Code Ocean70. There are no access restrictions.

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Acknowledgements

M.S.S.L.O. and R.J.v.W. acknowledge support from the VIDI research programme with project number 639.042.729, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). M.S.S.L.O. also acknowledges support from the CAS–NWO programme for radio astronomy with project number 629.001.024, which is financed by the NWO. In addition, M.S.S.L.O., R.T. and R.J.v.W. acknowledge support from the ERC Starting Grant ClusterWeb 804208. M.J.H. acknowledges support from the UK STFC (ST/V000624/1). R.T. is grateful for support from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (grant MR/T042842/1). A.B. acknowledges financial support from the European Union - Next Generation EU. F.d.G. acknowledges support from the ERC Consolidator Grant ULU 101086378. The work of D.S. was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We thank F. Sweijen for making available legacystamps67. We thank R. Caniato and J.H. Croston for illuminating discussions. LOFAR data products were provided by the LOFAR Surveys Key Science project (LSKSP68) and were derived from observations with the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). LOFAR30 is the LOw-Frequency ARray designed and constructed by ASTRON. It has observing, data-processing and data-storage facilities in several countries, which are owned by various parties (each with their own funding sources) and which are collectively operated by the ILT foundation under a joint scientific policy. The efforts of the LSKSP have benefited from funding from the European Research Council, NOVA, NWO, CNRS-INSU, the SURF Co-operative, the UK Science and Technology Funding Council and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. We thank the staff of the GMRT, who made these observations possible. The GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Martijn S. S. L. Oei, Roland Timmerman, Reinout J. van Weeren, Huub J. A. Röttgering & Huib T. Intema

  2. Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Martijn S. S. L. Oei, Antonio C. Rodriguez & S. G. Djorgovski

  3. Centre for Astrophysics Research (CAR), University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom

    Martin J. Hardcastle

  4. Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom

    Roland Timmerman

  5. Somerville College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Aivin R. D. J. G. I. B. Gast

  6. INAF–IRA, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Botteon & Francesco de Gasperin

  7. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Daniel Stern

  8. European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany

    Gabriela Calistro Rivera

  9. Institute of Communications and Navigation, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Weßling, Germany

    Gabriela Calistro Rivera

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  1. Martijn S. S. L. Oei
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Contributions

A.R.D.J.G.I.B.G. and M.S.S.L.O. discovered Porphyrion; M.J.H., assisted by citizen scientists, independently found the outflow as part of LOFAR Galaxy Zoo. M.S.S.L.O. coordinated the ensuing project. R.J.v.W., H.J.A.R. and M.J.H. advised M.S.S.L.O. throughout. A.B. re-reduced and imaged the 6.2″ and 19.8″ LOFAR data; R.J.v.W. contributed. R.T. reduced and imaged the 0.4″ LOFAR data. F.d.G. explored the use of LOFAR LBA data, which he reduced and imaged. M.S.S.L.O. wrote the uGMRT follow-up proposal. M.S.S.L.O. and H.T.I. reduced and imaged the uGMRT data. S.G.D., D.S. and H.J.A.R. were instrumental in securing Keck time (PI: S.G.D.). A.C.R. observed the host galaxy with the LRIS; A.C.R. and D.S. reduced the data. G.C.R. determined the SED and stellar mass of the host galaxy; M.S.S.L.O. contributed. M.J.H. determined core spectral indices of Mpc-scale outflows. M.S.S.L.O. determined the spurious association probability, the galaxy cluster distances and the circumgalactic cosmic web percentile. M.J.H. performed dynamical modelling; M.S.S.L.O. contributed. M.S.S.L.O. derived the deprojection and filament-heating formulae. M.S.S.L.O. wrote the article, with contributions from A.R.D.J.G.I.B.G., R.T. and A.C.R. All authors provided comments to improve the text.

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Correspondence to Martijn S. S. L. Oei.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 ILT image of Porphyrion at a lower resolution of 19.8″.

The image, again at central wavelength λ = 2.08 m, highlights diffuse emission in the northern lobe and southern backflow. We show the same sky region and annotations as in Fig. 1. The contours denote significance at fixed multiples of the image noise s.d. (σ): 3σ, 5σ and 10σ.

Extended Data Fig. 2 VLBI close-up of the centre of Porphyrion.

Our ILT image of Porphyrion’s central 3.84′ × 3.84′ at λ = 2.08 m and 0.4″ resolution covers a third of the total jet system and reveals two radio-luminous AGN, detected at a significance of about 40σ (s.d.). We overlay the overarching jet axis (translucent white), determined from the northern lobe and southern hotspot (not shown), to scale for a jet radius of 1 kpc. The jet axis seems to pass through J152932.16+601534.4.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Rest-frame ultraviolet–optical spectroscopy of J152933.03+601552.5.

(This is the quasar-hosting galaxy 19″ NNE of the host galaxy of Porphyrion.) We identify redshifted hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon and magnesium lines, jointly implying zs = 0.799 ± 0.001. Forbidden lines from the narrow-line region of the quasar are shown in red. The spectrum has been measured with the LRIS on the W. M. Keck Observatory’s Keck I telescope.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Astrometric offsets for the host galaxy of Porphyrion.

All flux densities used in the inference of the host galaxy SED occur within an arcsecond of the Legacy-Surveys-DR10-identified host position. Coloured disks show 1σ (s.d.) astrometric uncertainties and grey circles denote angular distances from the Legacy-Surveys-DR10-identified host position. The stars mark all other Legacy-Surveys-DR10-identified sources in the angular vicinity of Porphyrion’s host.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Radio spectral indices around the centre and southern tip of Porphyrion.

The top panel, which covers 3′ × 3′, reveals SSA at metre wavelengths in the host galaxy, consistent with the fuelling of powerful jets. The bottom panel, which covers 2′ × 2′, reveals a hotspot with backflow. We show effective spectral indices α between 0.46 and 2.08 m, at a resolution of 6.2″. From light to dark, the contours denote thermal-noise-induced spectral index uncertainties (s.d.) of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Radio spectral index distributions of the cores of Mpc-scale outflows.

Using LoTSS and VLASS data, we determined 924 effective spectral indices α between 0.1 and 2.08 m. In grey, we indicate the bins in which the core spectral indices of J152932.16+601534.4, the claimed host galaxy of Porphyrion, and J152933.03+601552.5 fall. The distribution suggests that the spectral index of J152932.16+601534.4 (α = −0.18 ± 0.06) is more typical of Mpc-scale outflows than the spectral index of J152933.03+601552.5. (For J152933.03+601552.5, owing to a VLASS non-detection, we show the LoTSS–uGMRT Band 4 spectral index.) The inset shows the same data as a function of redshift z. The orange subsample comprises Mpc-scale outflows whose redshifts differ at most Δz = 0.1 from those of either J152932.16+601534.4 or J152933.03+601552.5.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Probabilistic analysis of the distance to the nearest cluster.

DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR10 galaxy cluster redshift uncertainties induce multimodal, asymmetric probability distributions over measures of distance between the host galaxy of Porphyrion and the nearest galaxy cluster. We mark median-centred intervals containing 68% and 95% of all probability. The data suggest that Porphyrion does not originate from a cluster.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Environmental profiles assumed in our dynamical modelling.

We show the pressure, baryon density and temperature external to the outflow as a function of proper (rather than comoving) distance from the AGN of Porphyrion. The profiles consist of contributions from the presumed galaxy group of the outflow and the adjacent voids.

Extended Data Table 1 Flux densities Fν of Porphyrion’s host galaxy
Full size table

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Oei, M.S.S.L., Hardcastle, M.J., Timmerman, R. et al. Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web. Nature 633, 537–541 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07879-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07879-y

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