00:10We've discovered a twin jet system emerging from a black hole, and this pair of jets is
00:16about 23 million light years long. That is not just the solar system, not just the Milky Way,
00:25with 140 Milky Way diameters in total. That makes it the largest structure made by an astrophysical
00:32body like a black hole ever observed. I'm Rathai Nui, I'm a radio astronomer here at Galtech,
00:40and I study Cosmic Web and giant jet systems from black holes. In the center of every galaxy there
00:49is a big black hole of about a million to a billion solar masses. These swallow stars and dust and
00:56plasma that comes close to it, but they do not swallow everything that comes close. A tiny fraction
01:02of little material that is being ejected again just before it falls into the black hole, and those
01:07particles are funneled into two jets. These jets accelerate particles to close to the speed of light,
01:14therefore the jets start to glow in synchrotron radiation, and that is radiation that you can
01:20see with radio telescopes on Earth. What we tried to look for initially was a radio signature of the
01:27cosmic web. The cosmic web is a large-scale structure of the universe. It is the network of matter that
01:35pervades all space between the galaxies. It is possible to image the cosmic web using radio telescopes, we think.
01:43And while doing that, we found some very big outflows that were coming from galaxies. And using our new images,
01:50we were able to find 10,000 of these new objects.
01:55So it seems that every massive galaxy has black hole jets to some degree, but what we're discovering now
02:01is that an increasing number of galaxies actually have black hole jets that reach far out beyond the
02:07border of the galaxy itself. Whenever the jets reach the intergalactic space, then we think they have a big
02:16influence on heating the medium between the galaxies and on magnetizing it. Those are two very big
02:23questions. How did the universe get magnetized? And how did the large-scale structures that lie
02:29between galaxies came to be? One of the unexpected realizations of finding this giant jet system is that
02:38black hole jets can reach the scale of the cosmic web. They are so big that they can reach in
02:43principle
02:43everywhere. What we're now seeing is that they were also emerging far into the past. The very giant one
02:50that we have discovered lived even in the first half of the universe's existence, towards the detection limits
02:55of our current instruments. What I'm now researching is whether those giant jets can actually magnetize,
03:03whether they have spread magnetism in the medium between the galaxies. So the magnetism that started
03:09in the cosmic web eventually went into galaxies, then went into the formation of stars, and the young sun,
03:16when it was forming, transferred magnetic fields out to their planets. So even for understanding the origin
03:23of life, it is important to know how magnetism in the cosmos has come to be.
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