Black Hole Caught Blasting Matter into Space at 130 Million MPH

A black hole threw matter into space at 130 million km/h

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

Supermassive black holes are the monsters of the universe, so perhaps it’s only fitting that astronomers have discovered one of these giants triggering a brilliant X-ray flare that one of the researchers, astronomer Matteo Guainazzi, described as “almost too big to imagine” in a press release from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Hours after it erupted, the explosion faded and the black hole began to whip up winds more powerful than anything we can imagine on Earth and fling material into space at about 130 million kilometers per hour, a fifth of the speed of light. For comparison, plasma ejected during a coronal mass ejection from the sun typically travels at just three million mph.

To study the black hole, astronomers used two X-ray space telescopes: ESA’s XMM-Newton and the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, which is a collaboration between ESA, NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Hidden at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3783, the supermassive black hole, with a mass of 30 million suns, powers the galaxy’s core, a region known as the active galactic core.

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According to Guainazzi’s statement, the tangled magnetic fields in this region may have suddenly “untwisted,” generating the winds. Learning more about active galactic nuclei and how they generate such powerful jets and winds is key to understanding how galaxies form and evolve over time, study co-author and ESA researcher Camille Diez said in the press release.

The research was published Tuesday in Astronomy and astrophysics.

Editor’s note (9/12/25): This article was edited after publication to better clarify the speed at which the black hole threw matter into space and the source of comments from Matteo Guainazzi and Camille Diez.

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