A team led by York University researchers has discovered the fastest wind near a supermassive black hole ever found at ultraviolet wavelengths, driven by the disk of matter (quasar) surrounding the black hole.
“This quasar has a black hole of 1.7 billion times the mass of the sun. That’s typical. What’s not typical is that it has gas moving towards us at 30% of the speed of light,” says York Professor Patrick Hall of the Faculty of Science.
The finding is published in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
The scale of this discovery is breathtaking. A quasar wind at 30% light speed near a supermassive black hole really puts into perspective how violent and energetic the universe can be at its extremes. High-resolution imaging and spectroscopic analysis from JWST continue to reveal phenomena we could only theorize about a decade ago. The data processing involved in these observations must be incredibly sophisticated.