Black holes have always been a bit of a mystery. One of the reasons for this is the fact that they’re so far away from us which makes observation difficult. However, one thing we do now is that outflowing gas is a common feature among black holes and that they feed off gas that encircles them. This has been observed from space telescopes and shows as a bright light emitting from the innermost part of the black holes surrounding disk.
Another feature that’s apparent about black holes is that sometimes they consume too much gas and end up producing an ultra-fast wind that may have a strong influence on the way in which growth of the host galaxy is regulated. This kind of outflow has been observed recently by scientists using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuStar telescopes, recording winds as strong as an incredible 71,000 km/s inside the black hole.
Dr. Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge said, “We often only have one observation of a particular object, then several months or even years later we observe it again and see if there’s been a change. Thanks to this long observation campaign, we observed changes in the winds on a timescale of less than an hour for the first time.” These changes were observed in the increasing temperature of the winds and revealed moderate changes to the chemical fingerprints of the outflowing gas, which also involved seeing electrons stripped from their atoms as the X-ray emission increased.
“The chemical fingerprints of the wind changed with the strength of the X-rays in less than an hour, hundreds of times faster than ever seen before,” states Professor Andrew Fabian, co-author and principal investigator on the project and also from the Institute of Astronomy. Parker adds, “Black hole winds are one of the mechanisms for feedback, where the energy coming out from the black hole regulates the growth of the host galaxy. Understanding these winds is crucial to understanding how galaxies, including our own, grow.”
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