Supermassive black hole drives two ultra-fast winds at 30 and 10 percent of light speed
Two winds are tearing out of a supermassive black hole at 30% and 10% the speed of light, among the most powerful ever recorded. The XMM-Newton and NuSTAR X-ray telescopes caught the quasar ejecting about 21 and 24 suns of gas a year, starving its own galaxy of star-forming fuel.
A distant supermassive black hole has been caught driving two of the most powerful winds astronomers have ever measured, and the find sharpens how we understand the way these giants shape entire galaxies. Using the XMM-Newton and NuSTAR X-ray telescopes, a research team studied a hyper-luminous quasar from an era astronomers call cosmic noon, when galaxies were forming stars at their peak rate. They detected not one but two distinct outflows leaving the black hole: a fast inner stream moving at about 30% the speed of light, surrounded by a slower outer flow at roughly 10%. Together these winds carry off an enormous amount of material, ejecting the equivalent of about 21 and 24 times the mass of our Sun every single year. That places them among the most powerful and massive ultra-fast outflows ever observed. The layered structure matters because it lines up with long-standing predictions: a faster spine launched from the innermost edge of the black hole's accretion disk, wrapped in a slower sheath driven from farther out. Flows like these are thought to act as a throttle on galaxy growth, heating and pushing away the cold gas that stars need to form. By stripping that fuel, a single black hole can influence the fate of a galaxy far larger than itself. According to reporting from Phys.org on the study, submitted as a preprint in early June, the observations give astronomers a rare, detailed look at the engine connecting a black hole to the galaxy around it.