This Black Hole's Jet is a Million Light Years Long

本站添加: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Not one shot. They come back. And the question that Kamari's team could not answer, the question their data doesn't touch, is the one that should matter to you most. Scientists [music] don't know why. Let's be precise about size because imprecision is a kindness we cannot afford here. The total radio [music] structure of J1007+3540, the full extent of everything the black hole has inflated across two eruption cycles, [music] spans approximately 4.7 million light-years. The Milky Way, for comparison, is about 100,000 [music] light-years across. So, the complete structure is roughly 47 times the diameter of the galaxy you live in. But the active [music] jet, just the new one, the one that started recently, the one still growing, reaches almost 1 million light-years. If you want to hold that number in your body rather than just your mind, try this. Take our galaxy, the Milky Way, the entire thing, 400 billion stars, 100,000 light-years across, and shrink it to the size of a coin in your palm. At that scale, J1007+3540's [music] current jet would stretch from your hand, across the room, out the door, and continue for another 12 ft. That is one jet. One direction. There is another one going the opposite way. Same length.

[00:01:19]Same speed. Same energy. And both are moving outward through a galaxy that has stars in it