Author: Luke Barnes, Lecturer in Physics, Western Sydney University

The largest known black hole jets, 23 million light years across, have been discovered in the distant universe. This pair of particle beams launched by a supermassive black hole is over a hundred times larger than our galaxy, the Milky Way. In 2022, we announced the discovery of one of the largest black hole jets in the night sky, launched from a (relatively) nearby galaxy called NGC2663. Using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia, we confirmed that NGC2663’s jet is one of the largest in the sky. In other words, it appears to be the largest…