Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole raising cosmic winds at record speeds.
The black hole, located 135 million light-years from Earth at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3783, caught the attention of researchers after emitting a huge burst of speed of light — screaming in its wake.
“We have never seen a black hole create winds this quickly before,” Liyi Guan astronomer from the Netherlands Space Research Organization who led the research, said in a statement. statement.
Gu and his colleagues were studying NGC 3783 active galactic nucleus (AGN), the bright, active region surrounding a galaxy’s supermassive black hole. These areas are known to suddenly flare and spew jets of material and spiral into space. The researchers believe the intense X-ray burst and wind they observed were powered by the black hole’s tangled magnetic field, which suddenly “untwisted.”
The team compared this process to the way Earth’s sun releases huge eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections soon after, our star’s magnetic field lines become tangled and break. However, in this case, the supermassive black hole has a mass of 30 million suns, putting its flares and ejections “on a scale almost too large to imagine.” Matteo Guainazziteam member and European Space Agency (ESA) astronomer, said in the release. (For reference, the winds of a recent coronal mass ejection recorded at a paltry 930 miles, or 1,500 km, per second.)
The discovery was made thanks to the ESA 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 study other flared AGNs.
They also believe that studying AGNs and the intense flares they produce could help us better understand the evolution of galaxies.
“Because of their great influence, knowing more about the magnetism of AGNs and how they cause winds like these is essential to understanding the history of galaxies.” Camille Diezan astrophysicist and ESA researcher who participated in the research, said in the statement.
The scientists detailed their discovery in a paper published on December 9 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
