Tag Archive for 'Galactic wind'

This image shows NGC 4945, a spiral galaxy over 12 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus; NGC 4945’s supermassive black hole-driven wind is shown in red in the inset. Image credit: ESO / Marconcini et al.

NGC 4945’s Central Black Hole is Blowing Out Powerful Winds of Material, Astronomers Say

Apr 8, 2025 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have detected supermassive black hole-driven winds in the barred spiral galaxy...

An artist’s conception of the clouds flowing out from the center of the Milky Way, entrained in a very hot wind that has accelerated them to velocities of many hundreds of km per second. Image credit: NSF / GBO / P. Vosteen.

Astronomers Spot Hundreds of Massive Gas Clouds Escaping Milky Way’s Center

Feb 20, 2024 by News Staff

Using new 21-cm radio observations made with NSF’s Green Bank Telescope, astronomers have discovered over 250 neutral gaseous clouds being blasted out...

This artist impression shows ultra-fast winds blasting out from the center of galaxy Markarian 817. These winds, moving at many millions of km per hour, clear out interstellar gas from a vast region of space. Without this gas, the galaxy can’t form new stars and the black hole in the galactic center has little left to eat. The inset shows what is happening at galaxy’s heart. A supermassive black hole draws in gas from its surroundings, which forms a hot, brightly lit accretion disk (orange). The cause of the winds (white) is magnetic fields within the disk, which fling particles out in all directions at incredibly high speeds. These winds effectively block out X-rays (blue) which are sent out by the extremely hot plasma surrounding the black hole, called the corona. Zak et al. caught Markarian 817 blasting out ultra-fast winds using ESA’s X-ray telescope XMM-Newton. Lasting for around a year, the winds will have significantly affected star formation in the galaxy. The fact that the black hole at the center of the galaxy was showing rather average activity levels before producing the winds suggests that ultra-fast black hole winds are much more common than previously thought. In other words, black holes and their host galaxies strongly affect each other’s evolution. Image credit: ESA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

XMM-Newton Detects Ultra-Fast Black Hole Wind in Markarian 817

Feb 1, 2024 by News Staff

Markarian 817 is a Seyfert 1 galaxy located 430 million light-years away in the constellation of Draco. Also known as Mrk 817 or QSO J1436+5847, it hosts...

ASKAP radio continuum image of ORC 1 (contours) overlaid onto a DES 3-color composite image. Two galaxies of interest: ‘C’ lies near the center of ORC 1 and ‘S’ coincides with the southern radio peak. Image credit: Norris et al, arXiv: 2006.14805.

Astronomers Solve Mystery of Odd Radio Circles

Jan 9, 2024 by News Staff

Odd radio circles (ORCs), a class of extragalactic astronomical sources discovered in 2019, are in fact shells formed by outflowing galactic winds, possibly...

An artist’s impression of a galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole located in the center of a galaxy. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO.

ALMA Detects Powerful Black-Hole Wind in Distant Quasar

Jun 17, 2021 by News Staff

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected a galactic-scale supermassive black hole-driven wind in HSC J124353.93+010038.5...

Supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies blast radiation and ultra-fast winds outward, as illustrated in this artist’s conception. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers Detect Anomalous Cold Gas Outflow from Milky Way’s Center

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have observed cold, dense and high-velocity molecular gas outflowing from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The presence of this gas is puzzling,...

An artist’s impression of a quasar. Image credit: NASA / ESA / J. Olmsted, STScI.

Hubble Space Telescope Spots Quasar Tsunamis

Mar 20, 2020 by News Staff

Quasars are the ultra-bright cores of distant active galaxies. These objects are among the most distant and luminous objects known. Their central engines...

A volume rendering of the ionized gas wind in the Makani galaxy. Two of the dimensions are spatial, and the third is velocity. The colors trace the velocity axis, shown by the arrow at center. The approximate locations of the two proposed outflow episodes are labeled. Image credit: Jim Geach, David Tree & Peter Richardson, University of Hertfordshire.

Astronomers Observe Giant Outflow of Gas Extending Far Beyond Compact Galaxy

Oct 31, 2019 by News Staff

The direct evidence of the role of galactic winds — ejections of gas from galaxies — in creating the so-called circumgalactic medium has been...

Dwarf galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei that have spatially extended outflows. Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Black Hole-Driven Winds Suppress Star Formation in Dwarf Galaxies

Oct 14, 2019 by News Staff

Supermassive black hole-driven outflows in dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation, according...

This composite image shows the starburst galaxy Messier 82. The magnetic field detected by SOFIA, shown as streamlines, appears to follow the bipolar outflows (red) generated by the intense nuclear starburst. The image combines visible starlight (gray) and a tracing of hydrogen gas (red) from the Kitt Peak Observatory, with near-infrared and mid-infrared starlight and dust (yellow) from SOFIA and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA / SOFIA / E. Lopez-Rodriguez / Spitzer / J. Moustakas et al.

SOFIA Observes Galactic Superwind in Messier 82

Mar 6, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) have discovered that the galactic wind flowing from the center of Messier...

Exploding Stars May Drive Galactic-Scale Superwinds

Aug 22, 2012 by Sergio Prostak

Astronomers at the University of California have found outflowing galactic winds with velocities up to 2,500 km per second that they detected in 29 massive...