It is located in the constellation Draco and it was discovered in Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) data by an international team led by Martijn Oei.

[3] Porphyrion was first reported in a paper in Nature by Martijn Oei (Leiden University/Caltech) and colleagues, which featured on the cover of the 19 September 2024 issue, after obtaining results from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Two-metre Sky Survey (LoTSS), an interferometric radio survey of the Northern Sky.

[6] To find the galaxy from which Porphyrion originated, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India was used along with ancillary data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument in Arizona.

The observations also revealed that Porphyrion emerged from a radiative-mode active black hole, as opposed to one in a jet-mode state.

[8] Oei and his colleagues believe that "every place in the universe may have been affected by black hole activity at some point in cosmic time".