Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that is whipping up cosmic winds at record speed.
The black hole, located 135 million light-years from Earth at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 3783, caught the attention of researchers after it emitted a huge X-ray flare. When the explosion subsided, winds roared at more than 37,000 miles per second (60,000 kilometers per second), one-fifth the speed of light.
“We have never seen a black hole generate winds at such speeds before,” Li Gu, an astronomer at the Netherlands Space Research Organization who led the study, said in a statement.
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Gu and his colleagues were studying NGC 3783’s active galactic nucleus (AGN), a bright, crowded region surrounding the galaxy’s feeding supermassive black hole. These regions are known to burst into flames, spew out jets of material, and wind their way into space. The researchers believe that the intense X-ray bursts and subsequent strong winds they observed were caused by the black hole’s entangled magnetic field, which suddenly “untwisted”.
The researchers likened this process to Earth’s sun releasing a huge eruption of plasma, called a coronal mass ejection, shortly after a star’s magnetic field lines become entangled or broken. But in this case, the supermassive black hole has the mass of 30 million suns, making its flares and ejections “on an unimaginably large scale,” team member Matteo Guainazzi, an astronomer at the European Space Agency, said in a statement. (For reference, wind speeds from recent coronal mass ejections were a paltry 930 miles per second (1,500 km).)
The discovery was made using ESA’s XMM-Newton and XRISM X-ray space telescopes. Gu’s team used the two telescopes in tandem, tracking the initial flare with XMM-Newton’s optical monitor and analyzing the resulting winds with XRISM’s Resolve instrument. The researchers hope to take a similar collaborative approach to investigate other flare-type AGNs.
They also believe that studying AGN and the intense flares it produces could help further our understanding of how galaxies evolve.
“They are so influential that learning more about the magnetism of AGNs and how they create these winds is key to understanding the history of galaxies,” Camille Diez, an astrophysicist and ESA fellow who participated in the study, said in a statement.
Scientists detailed their discovery in a paper published Dec. 9 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
