Powerful Black-Hole Wind Ruffles Spiral Galaxy
A huge, windy swirl of gas — usually
found in the largest, most active galaxies — commands the center of a spiral
similar to the Milky Way and may disrupt the galaxy's star formation process,
new research shows.
The galaxy, spotted by the European
Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton satellite telescope observatory, is, like the
Milky Way, a spiral with a supermassive black hole at the center. But its
center's ability to produce new stars is compromised due to a fierce wind
coming from that black hole as it swallows up its surroundings, ESA officials
said in a statement. The gases and winds swirl around the black hole at about
10 percent of the speed of light, the statement said.
While there is nothing unusual about
finding swirling hot discs of space detritus surrounding the peripheries of
supermassive black holes in the center of active galaxies, the phenomenon
usually occurs in galaxies that have collided together, often the
most massive elliptical galaxies. By contrast, this is a smaller spiral galaxy,
called a "Seyfert."
Although the, Milky Way galaxy is not
a Seyfert, both the Milky Way and this galaxy, called IRAS17020+4544, wind into
a similar spiral shape. Unlike the Milky Way, however, a Seyfert has a bright
core that shines across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
The Seyfert galaxy is located 800
million light-years from Earth. Its enormous central black hole contains the
mass of nearly 6 million suns. By contrast, Sagittarius A, the supermassive
black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, likely contains about 4.5 million times the mass of our sun.
"Of course, we cannot be sure,
but our discovery implies that fast outflows like those found in IRAS17020+4544
may have once swept through our own galaxy during one of [its central black
hole's] active phases," study co-author Matteo Guainazzi, an ESA
astronomer currently at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, said in the statement. "This possibility was
not considered before, because this 'feedback' from X-ray winds was previously
observed only in galaxies very different from the Milky Way."
