{"id":226137,"date":"2025-12-10T20:16:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T20:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/226137\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T20:16:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T20:16:12","slug":"astronomers-observe-never-before-seen-gusts-of-wind-from-a-black-hole-in-a-distant-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/226137\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers observe never-before-seen gusts of wind from a black hole in a distant galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Published on
\n 10\/12\/2025 – 13:19 GMT+1\n <\/p>\n

In a galaxy far, far away, a black hole is whipping up winds so powerful that human minds back on Earth can hardly fathom their scale. For the first time, a team of global astronomers has been able to directly observe this phenomenon.<\/p>\n

The gigantic black hole \u2013 as big as 30 million of our galaxy\u2019s Suns \u2013 is located in the NGC 3783, a spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n

Using two leading X-ray space telescopes, astronomers spotted the black hole devouring everything around it in order to power an extremely bright and active region at the centre of the galaxy \u2013 known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN).<\/p>\n

As it sucked up this material, the black hole emitted a bright, fleeting X-ray flare that quickly gave way to ultra-fast winds \u2013 some of which clocked in at nearly 60,000 kilometres per second, or 20 per cent the speed of light.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve not watched a black hole create winds this speedily before,\u201d Liyi Gu from the Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON) said in a statement. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time, we\u2019ve seen how a rapid burst of X-ray light from a black hole immediately triggers ultra-fast winds, with these winds forming in just a single day,\u201d Gu, who led the team of researchers, added.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s research was published this week in the international journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Two powerful deep space telescopes<\/p>\n

To study this phenomenon, which is one of the most elusive in the Universe, Gu and colleagues used two powerful telescopes \u2013 the European Space Agency\u2019s (ESA) XMM-Newton and the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM).<\/p>\n

XMM-Newton tracked the initial flare\u2019s evolution and assessed the extent of the winds, while XRISM spotted the flare and winds, studying their speed and structure.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir discovery stems from successful collaboration, something that\u2019s a core part of all ESA missions,\u201d Erik Kuulkers, a scientist on the ESA XMM-Newton project, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors believe the winds were created as the black hole\u2019s tangled magnetic field \u201cuntwisted.\u201d They said this process resembles large solar eruptions in our own galaxy, known as coronal mass ejections.<\/p>\n

It is \u201csimilar to the flares that erupt from the Sun, but on a scale almost too big to imagine,\u201d said the study\u2019s co-author Matteo Guainazzi, a scientist on the ESA XRISM project.<\/p>\n

These similarities are reassuring, researchers said, showing that supermassive black holes can sometimes act like our own local star, and therefore cutting through some of the mystery around these objects.<\/p>\n

Scientists recorded coronal mass ejections from our own Sun as recently as November 11, with wind speeds of 1,500 kilometres per second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on 10\/12\/2025 – 13:19 GMT+1 In a galaxy far, far away, a black hole is whipping up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[3514,18,28434,19,17,121406,133,451,1224,93579,5610],"class_list":{"0":"post-226137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-black-hole","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-european-space-agency","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-japan-aerospace-exploration-agency-jaxa","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-space-exploration","17":"tag-space-telescope","18":"tag-universe"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115697115906021989","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}