All posts tagged: supermassive black holes

Powerful black hole pushes quasar’s winds across 300,000 light-years

Powerful black hole pushes quasar’s winds across 300,000 light-years

Published by Jenni Sidey

A quasar 3.4 billion light-years away is stirring hot gas across roughly 300,000 light-years, far beyond the galaxy that contains it. XRISM detected unusually fast gas motions carrying about 100 times more energy than earlier estimates for similar black-hole winds. The observations may help astronomers improve models of how black holes influence galaxy clusters, though turbulence, gas flows and sloshing remain difficult to separate. A quasar 3.4 billion light-years away is stirring hot gas far beyond its home galaxy, sending energy through a region 300,000 light-years wide. The disturbance is forcing astronomers to rethink how far black-hole winds can reach. The source is H1821+643, a bright quasar in the constellation Draco. At its center sits a supermassive black hole about 2.6 billion times the mass of the sun. It shines far more powerfully than most nearby quasars despite weak radio jets. “Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds,” said Satoshi Yamada, an assistant professor at Tohoku University’s Frontier Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences. …

Super rare black hole devours unlucky star

Super rare black hole devours unlucky star

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. A mysterious, brilliantly bright eruption in deep space is one of the rarest cosmic interactions ever observed by astronomers. Using a new search method, NASA researchers successfully identified an “orphan” supermassive black hole dining on a wayward star about 750 million light-years from Earth. The details are described in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Almost every known galaxy is centered on a supermassive black hole that devours anything unfortunate enough to fall into its gravitational pull. However, black holes also receive a special meal about once every 100,000 years. Occasionally, a star will drift too close and begin disintegrating under the incomprehensible forces at work, kicking off a luminous situation called a tidal disruption event (TDE). While rare in …

New study challenges existing knowledge for why galaxies stop forming stars

New study challenges existing knowledge for why galaxies stop forming stars

Published by Jenni Sidey

Most galaxy collisions do not cause galaxies to stop making new stars. A galaxy’s central black hole and its slow, long-term growth appear more important than sudden cosmic crashes. The findings suggest galaxies usually fade gradually because they lose access to fresh gas, rather than shutting down after one violent event. Galaxy mergers have carried a dramatic reputation for decades. Two enormous systems collide, gas rushes inward, a central black hole erupts and star formation ends. A sweeping simulation analysis now challenges nearly every step of that familiar story. Researchers at Florida International University examined 11,724 simulated galaxies and found that mergers were neither necessary nor sufficient to stop star formation. The shutdown process, known as quenching, appeared far more closely tied to gradual internal evolution. Only about 3 percent of major mergers were associated with quenching within a window beginning one billion years before the shutdown process. Extending that window to two billion years raised the figure to about 5 percent. When the team included mergers of every size, the proportions rose to about …

JWST reveals how a supermassive black hole keeps feeding itself

JWST reveals how a supermassive black hole keeps feeding itself

Published by Jenni Sidey

Supermassive black holes can heat the gas around them so fiercely that their own food supply should disappear. New James Webb Space Telescope images now show how that fuel returns, tracing a filament directly into a rotating disk around one black hole. “JWST observations are offering us thousands of new facts and measurements, and I can report it’s a lot to absorb,” said Megan Donahue, an MSU University Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy. “We are all working together to solve the astrophysics questions about how these black holes get their fuel and how they interact with their host galaxy.” Nearly every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole millions or billions of times more massive than the sun. When one actively consumes surrounding material, it becomes an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. A close-up of the center of galaxy NGC4696 around its supermassive black hole. The background greyscale imaging comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. (CREDIT: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. Hlavacek-Larrondo, et al. 2026) An AGN can launch powerful jets that heat nearby gas, slow star formation …

Euclid finds 31 distant quasars dating back 800 million years

Euclid finds 31 distant quasars dating back 800 million years

Published by Jenni Sidey

Euclid has turned up a long-sought population of ancient quasars, including the most distant one yet seen. As a result, it has started to change how astronomers study the Universe’s first giant black holes. The European Space Agency telescope found 31 new quasars dating to a time when the cosmos was less than 800 million years old. Of these, twelve sit at redshift 7 or higher. That means their light comes from the first 770 million years after the Big Bang. Two go even farther back. The most distant, EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, has a redshift of about 7.77. This places it just 662 million years into cosmic history. A second, EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, sits at about 7.69. That matters because quasars at these distances are both rare and revealing. A quasar forms during a short, violent stage in a galaxy’s life. It appears when matter spirals into the central supermassive black hole and releases huge amounts of energy. The glare can outshine the rest of the galaxy by hundreds or even thousands of times. Therefore, quasars are …

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way’s central black hole has long posed an awkward problem. By every standard picture of how black holes behave, Sagittarius A* should be blowing material back into space as it feeds. Yet for more than half a century, astronomers could not find clear evidence that it was doing so. Now they say that missing wind has finally turned up. A team at Northwestern University used years of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to build an unusually sharp map of the cold gas crowding the black hole’s neighborhood. In that map, they found a broad, cone-shaped cavity carved out of molecular gas within about one parsec, or roughly three light-years, of Sagittarius A*. The researchers argue that only a hot wind from the black hole can explain the feature. Therefore, this offers what they describe as the clearest evidence yet that the Milky Way’s central black hole is not an exception to the usual rules. The highest-resolution and most sensitive map of cold gas within ∼1 pc from …

Massive black hole from the early universe has astronomers looking back to the Big Bang

Massive black hole from the early universe has astronomers looking back to the Big Bang

Published by Jenni Sidey

Far back in cosmic time, one small red object is refusing to behave. Abell 2744–QSO1 appears just 700 million years after the Big Bang, an era when astronomers expect to find young galaxies still putting themselves together. In that picture, stars should come first, building up the visible mass of a galaxy, while black holes grow more gradually inside them. But this object, seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, looks almost upside down. Its central black hole is estimated at about 50 million times the mass of the sun. The stars around it, by contrast, seem scarce. Some measurements place the stellar mass below about 20 million solar masses. Other estimates push that ceiling much lower, to roughly 1 million solar masses. Either way, the black hole seems uncomfortably large for the meager galaxy around it. “This is a puzzle, because the traditional theory says that you form stars first, or together with black holes,” Boyuan Liu from the University of Cambridge said. That mismatch is a big reason Abell 2744–QSO1 has drawn so much …

Two supermassive black holes are on a collision course

Two supermassive black holes are on a collision course

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Supermassive black holes literally don’t add up. Astrophysicists know it takes more time than is mathematically possible for one of them to reach its incomprehensible proportions via standard gas accretion. Despite this, they are clearly observable at the center of nearly every large galaxy. So how do they get so big? The likeliest explanation is that supermassive black holes attain their size when two smaller black holes smack into one another during a galactic collision. For years, this theory has remained simply that—a theory. However, evidence from a team at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy now offers the first clear look at a pair of supermassive black holes at the heart of a distant galaxy. As they explain in a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the duo is racing towards a head-on collision. Markarian 501 (Mrk 501) is an elliptical galaxy located in the Hercules constellation, and the site of …

Black hole-powered blazars may explain the highest-energy neutrino ever detected

Black hole-powered blazars may explain the highest-energy neutrino ever detected

Published by Jenni Sidey

A single particle cut through the Mediterranean in February 2023 carrying an almost absurd amount of energy. Detected deep off the coast of Sicily by the KM3NeT/ARCA neutrino telescope, the neutrino clocked in at about 220 petaelectronvolts, making it the most energetic neutrino ever recorded. That one event, known as KM3-230213A, stood out immediately. Its energy was more than an order of magnitude above previously observed high-energy neutrinos, and no one could say for sure where it came from. Now, a new paper in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics argues that the particle may not have come from one dramatic outburst at all. Instead, it may have emerged from a wider population of blazars, active galactic nuclei powered by supermassive black holes whose jets point toward Earth. The idea does not solve the mystery outright. It does, however, offer a physically consistent explanation that fits what astronomers have seen, and what they have not. Differential luminosity for gamma-rays and neutrinos (all-flavor) as a function of the energy. The values of the baryonic loading …

Physicists propose a new way to spot supermassive black hole pairs

Physicists propose a new way to spot supermassive black hole pairs

Published by Jenni Sidey

Supermassive black holes rarely travel alone. Most large galaxies hide one at the center, and when galaxies collide, the two central black holes can end up bound together. Astronomers have seen plenty of wide pairs. The tighter ones, the kind that spiral inward and eventually merge, have been much harder to pin down. Researchers at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) think the missing systems may be giving themselves away anyway, in brief, repeating flashes of starlight. In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, they argue that a tight supermassive black hole binary could act like a moving magnifying glass, repeatedly boosting the light from individual stars in the same galaxy. “Supermassive black holes act as natural telescopes,” said Dr Miguel Zumalacárregui from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. “Because of their enormous mass and compact size, they strongly bend passing light. Starlight from the same host galaxy can be focused into extraordinarily bright images, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.” Artistic impression …