Astronomers have witnessed a dramatic and never-before-seen event near a supermassive black hole: an intense X-ray flare that, within hours, triggered ultra-fast winds blasting material into space at astonishing speeds.
The discovery offers rare insight into how black holes interact with their surroundings and shape the galaxies they live in.
The event was spotted in a spiral galaxy called NGC 3783, located about 135 million light-years from Earth.
At its center lies a supermassive black hole with a mass around 30 million times that of the Sun.
Using two of the world’s most powerful X-ray observatories — the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the newly launched XRISM mission — scientists were able to track the entire sequence of events as it unfolded.
First came a bright flash of X-rays from the region surrounding the black hole.
This area, known as an active galactic nucleus, or AGN, glows intensely as the black hole pulls in nearby gas and dust. The flare itself faded quickly, but as it did, something remarkable happened.
Powerful winds suddenly appeared, racing outward at around 60,000 kilometers per second, or about one-fifth the speed of light. According to the researchers, this is the fastest and most rapid wind formation ever observed from a black hole.
What makes this discovery especially exciting is how quickly everything occurred. Scientists have seen black hole winds before, but never forming on such short timescales.
In this case, the winds seem to have been triggered directly by the X-ray flare, emerging in less than a day. This close connection between flares and winds has long been suspected, but until now had never been observed so clearly.
The researchers believe the winds were powered by sudden changes in the black hole’s magnetic field.
As matter spirals toward a black hole, it drags magnetic field lines along with it. These fields can become tightly twisted and unstable. When they suddenly rearrange or “snap,” they can release enormous amounts of energy, much like solar flares on the Sun. In fact, the team compares this event to a giant version of a solar coronal mass ejection, where the Sun throws huge clouds of hot plasma into space.
While the Sun’s eruptions can reach speeds of a few thousand kilometers per second, the black hole’s winds are tens of times faster and vastly more energetic. Still, the similarity suggests that the same basic physical processes may operate across the universe, from stars to supermassive black holes.
These powerful winds are not just dramatic; they also matter for the long-term evolution of galaxies. By pushing gas away from the galactic center, black hole winds can slow or even stop star formation, reshaping how galaxies grow over billions of years. Understanding how these winds form and behave is therefore essential to understanding the history of galaxies across the cosmos.
The discovery was made possible by the combined strengths of XMM-Newton and XRISM. XMM-Newton tracked how the flare brightened and faded, while XRISM provided detailed measurements of the wind’s speed and structure. Together, the two telescopes captured a fleeting but crucial moment.
By revealing that black holes can unleash ultra-fast winds almost instantly after a flare, the study brings astronomers closer to understanding these extreme objects — and shows that, in some surprising ways, black holes may behave a bit like our own Sun, just on a vastly larger and more powerful scale.
Source: KSR.
