An experiment here on Earth has just replicated one of the most extreme astrophysical processes in miniature. Physicists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have succeeded in creating collimated jets that resemble those that erupt from baby stars and feeding black holes.

By using protons to probe how a magnetic field responds to an expanding plasma, experimenters have replicated the particle jets spewed out by active black holes.

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.