Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web

Abstract

When sustained for megayears (refs. 1,2), high-power jets from supermassive black holes (SMBHs) become the largest galaxy-made structures in the Universe 3. 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 web 4–6 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. 7–9), or 20–30% of a cosmic void radius in the Local Universe 10. An observational lack of longer jets, as well as theoretical results 11, 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 15 −2 +6 times denser than it is today. How jets can retain such long-lived coherence is unknown at present.