Astronomers discovered a monster of a galaxy.
Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy that is 5 megaparsecs in size. It is the largest known structure of the origin of the universe.
The discovery shows that we don't know what drives their growth.
It could provide a path to better understanding, not just of giant radio galaxies, but the intergalactic medium that floats in the voids of space.
There are a lot of mysteries in the universe. They are made up of a cluster of stars in a nucleus containing a black hole, as well as jets and lobes that come from the center.
The jets and lobes act as a strontium to accelerate electrons that produce radio emission.
The jets are produced by a black hole at the center of the universe. Black holes are referred to as active when they guzzling down material from a giant disk of material around them.
Not all of the material in the accretion disk will end up in the black hole. It is blasted into space in the form of jets of ionized plasma at a significant percentage of the speed of light.
The jets can travel huge distances before they spread out.
The process is not unusual. The universe has radio waves. We don't have a good understanding of why some galaxies grow to gargantuan sizes. The most extreme examples could help understand what drives their growth.
"If there are host galaxy characteristics that are an important cause for giant radio galaxy growth, then the hosts of the largest giant radio galaxies are likely to possess them," the researchers said.
The largest giant radio galaxies are likely to reside in certain large-scale environments if they exist.
The team looked for outliers in the data collected by the LOw Frequency Array in Europe, an interferometric network consisting of around 20,000 radio antennas.
They reprocessed the data through a new process, removing compact radio sources that might interfere with detection of diffuse radio lobes.
They say the images represent the most sensitive search ever done. They used the best pattern recognition tool to locate their own eyes.
A few billion light-years away, Alcyoneus was discovered.
A giant radio galaxy with a projected proper length of 4.99 0.04 megaparsecs has been found. They said that the true length is at least five megaparsecs.
The researchers used the digital sky survey to try to understand the host galaxy.
It's a normal elliptical galaxy with a black hole that's around 400 million times the mass of the Sun, and it's embedded in a filaments of the Cosmic Web.
Some clues as to what drives the growth of radio lobes could be provided by these parameters.
The total low-frequency luminosity density, stellar mass, and supermassive black hole mass are all lower than those of the medial giant radio galaxies.
If the observed state is representative of the source over its lifetime, neither is high radio power.
It's possible that Alcyoneus is sitting in a region of space that is less dense than average, which will allow it to expand.
The researchers think that Alcyoneus is still growing even bigger in the dark.
The research was published in a scientific journal.
There was an earlier version of this article.
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