The supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies aren't just decorative. The intense radiation they emit when feeding helps drive away gas and dust that would otherwise form stars, providing feedback that limits the growth of the galaxy.

In other words, one black hole is continuously erupting energy and plasma into space across a distance more than 140 times longer than our whole galaxy, and it’s carrying the power of trillions of stars. Oei and his colleagues nicknamed the pair Porphyrion. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in those two giant eruptions,” says Oei in a statement.

Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite directions from a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy - the largest such jets ever spotted, extending about 140 times the diameter of our vast Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists have discovered the longest pair of jets streaming from a black hole in a distant galaxy. The jets shooting hot plasma are the largest ever spotted – about as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up end-to-end.

An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light- years. That is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back.