Black Hole Whips up Furious Winds while Experts Watch

Black holes: we know so little about them (we're not even sure they exist!) and yet one is quite literally the center of our galaxy. Now a pair of telescopes has identified strong evidence of radiation and ultra-fast winds blowing in a nearly spherical fashion, suggesting that black holes are more than just bottomless pits of condensing matter.

"We know black holes in the centers of galaxies can feed on matter, and this process can produce winds. This is thought to regulate the growth of the galaxies," Fiona Harrison, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the principal investigator of NASA's NuSTAR project, explained in a statement. "Knowing the speed, shape and size of the winds, we can now figure out how powerful they are."

Harrison is one of the authors of a new study that details how NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope are noticing X-ray-emitting winds blasting from the supermassive black hole PDS 456. This supermassive is an extremely bright (lots of light radiation emissions) black hole known as a quasar, making it easy for specialized telescopes to observe even when it's a stunning two billion light-years away.

NuSTAR and XMM-Newton simultaneously observed PDS 456 on five separate occasions in 2013 and 2014, finding that PDS 456 was emitting more energy-per-second in vicious "winds" than a trillion Suns would. (Scroll to read on...)

The researchers found that these winds were physically driving gas supplies from the galaxy that the quasar hosts, "significantly contributing to mass loss" of that galaxy, according to lead study author Emanuele Nardini of Keele University in England.

Combining higher-energy X-ray data from NuSTAR with observations from XMM-Newton, scientists were even able to find signatures of iron scattered from the quasar on all sides. This proves that the winds emanate from the black hole not in a single trail, but in a nearly spherical fashion.

Researchers now hope that by knowing these wind patterns, they can determine how supermassive black holes eventually halt the growth of a galaxy - limiting how many stars and solar systems it may form.

"For an astronomer, studying PDS 456 is like a paleontologist being given a living dinosaur to study," added co-author Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We are able to investigate the physics of these important systems with a level of detail [once] not possible."

Results of the study were published in the journal Science.

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