A black hole jet from the Centaurus A galaxy is "hitting something along its path," that is baffling astronomers. The Chandra X-ray Telescop team takes you on a tour of the system. Credit: NASA/CXC/A.

Astronomers have discovered extraordinarily powerful X-ray jets blasting from two supermassive black holes that are so ancient that the jets shine in the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Using the XMM-Newton telescope, astronomers have witnessed high-speed "burps" erupting from a distant overfeeding supermassive black hole.

Astronomers have spotted a massive pair of jets releasing material from a distant black hole. The jets are so large they span about 140 Milky Way galaxies in length.

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.

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 ...

But in the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen and astronomers are beginning to understand how they form. Called supermassive black holes, they have been found at the center of pretty much every galaxy and are a hundred thousand to a billion times the mass of our sun.

The largest-ever black hole jets ever seen hint that these cosmic monsters may play an even more significant role in shaping galaxies than previously thought.

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.