An international team of astronomers have recently observed a dramatic event unfolding in the heart of NGC 3783a spiral galaxy located about 130 million light-years from Earth. At its centre lies a supermassive black hole around 30 million times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers detected a bright X-ray flare erupting from the black hole, before swiftly fading away. As it faded, powerful winds emerged, blasting material into space at approximately 60,000 km per second, about one-fifth the speed of light. These winds were generated so quickly that researchers were able to watch them form over the course of a single day. “We’ve not watched a black hole create winds this speedily before,” said Liyi Gu, the lead researcher atSpace Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON).
Devouring material
This discovery was made through coordinated observations by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the XRISM mission, an X-ray telescope developed by JAXA with ESA and NASA participation. XMM-Newton monitored the bright flare and tracked changes in the region’s X-ray emission, while XRISM’s sensitive instruments measured both the speed and structure of the emerging winds. The flare’s rapid rise and decline appeared to trigger the ultra-fast outflow, offering new insight into how black holes influence their surroundings. According to ESA, the black hole in question is as massive as 30 million Suns. As it feasts on nearby material, it powers an extremely bright and active region at the heart of the spiral galaxy. The work has been published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
A link to solar physics and galaxy evolution
The characteristics of this event have surprising parallels with phenomena seen on our own Sun. The winds from the black hole bear resemblance to solar eruptions from material known as coronal mass ejections. These are powerful eruptions of plasma and magnetic field that the Sun periodically hurls into space. This analogy arises because, as the X-ray flare faded, tangled magnetic fields of the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) of the black hole may have ‘untwisted’, launching the high-speed winds, similar to the flares that erupt from the Sun, but on a scale almost too big to imagine.
Beyond the immediate spectacle, these ultra-fast winds could play a significant role in shaping the evolution of NGC 3783 itself. Understanding how these processes work in real time provides astronomers with important clues about the life cycles of galaxies over cosmic history.
