Black hole blasts ultra-fast winds at 134 million mph in rare cosmic flare
Astronomers with the European Space Agency say X-ray telescopes witnessed an ultra-fast blast from a supermassive black hole moving at one-fifth the speed of light.
NASA says that a stellar-mass black hole tore a star apart, which created an unusually long-lasting gamma-ray burst that has been identified as “GRB 250702B.” AccuWeather’s Emilee Speck has the story.
A supermassive black hole has astonished astronomers after it was observed blasting out powerful winds raging at roughly one-fifth the speed of light.
Two X-ray observatories, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and Japan’s XRISM, simultaneously studied the galaxy NGC 3783 and its central supermassive black hole, which has a mass equivalent to 30 million suns.
This image features NGC 3783, a bright barred spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth, that also lends its name to the eponymous NGC 3783 galaxy group. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. C. Bentz, D. J. V. Rosario)
ESA XRISM Project Scientist Matteo Guainazzi said this region of the universe is known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), a key target for both missions.
A new study, co-authored by Guainazzi, highlights a recent X-ray flare from the black hole that produced winds faster than previously recorded: around 134 million mph.
The study’s authors note that these black hole winds resemble coronal mass ejections (CME) in our own solar system — massive bursts of plasma and magnetic fields launched by the sun.
“But on a scale almost too big to imagine,” Guainazzi said.
This artist’s impression depicts the black hole in question. The swirling ‘doughnut’ of golden material is known as an accretion disc: a ring of material that is circling the black hole and will ultimately be devoured, pulled in closer and closer by the black hole’s colossal gravity. The bright spot marks a superheated region of material – a ‘hotspot’ that was seen to release first a looping X-ray flare, and then the intense ‘outflow’ of winds seen shooting to the top of the frame. (Credit: ESA)
Solar wind can also reach extreme speeds, with initial bursts traveling up to 3 million mph though still far slower than the violent outflows from an AGN.
Scientists say studying these turbulent, windy AGNs can help reveal how galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time.
ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist Erik Kuulkers said using two telescopes in tandem to observe a supermassive black hole made it possible to uncover these surprising parallels with our own sun.
“This suggests that solar and high-energy physics may work in surprisingly familiar ways throughout the universe,” Kuulkers said.
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