U-M, XMM-Newton spot a black hole giving ‘fierce feedback’

February 8, 2024
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The European Space Agency
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This artist impression shows ultra-fast winds blasting out from the center of galaxy Markarian 817. These winds, moving at many millions of kilometers 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. Image credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)
This artist impression shows ultra-fast winds blasting out from the center of galaxy Markarian 817. These winds, moving at many millions of kilometers 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. Image credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)

Black holes are like temperamental toddlers.

They spill food all the time, but observations led by the University of Michigan using the European Space Agency’s x-ray telescope XMM-Newton has caught a black hole in the act of “flipping over the table” during an otherwise civilized meal. This act prevents the galaxy surrounding the black hole from forming new stars, giving us insight into how black holes and galaxies co-evolve. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the heart of every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, whose immense gravity draws in gas from its surroundings. As the gas spirals inwards, it bunches up in a flat accretion disc around the black hole, where it heats and lights up. Over time, the gas closest to the black hole passes the point of no return and gets gobbled up.

However, black holes only consume a fraction of the gas spiraling toward them. While encircling a black hole, some matter is flung back out into space, much like how a messy toddler spills a lot of what lies on their plate.

In more dramatic episodes, a black hole will flip over the entire dinner table: gas in the accretion disc gets flung out in all directions at such high speeds that it clears out the surrounding interstellar gas. Not only does this deprive the black hole of food, it also means no new stars can form over a vast region, changing the structure of the galaxy.

The inset shows what is happening at the galaxy's heart. A supermassive black hole draws in gas from its surroundings, which forms a hot, brightly lit ‘accretion disc’ (orange). The cause of the winds (white) is magnetic fields within the disc, 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. Image credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)
The inset shows what is happening at the galaxy’s heart. A supermassive black hole draws in gas from its surroundings, which forms a hot, brightly lit ‘accretion disc’ (orange). The cause of the winds (white) is magnetic fields within the disc, 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. Image credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)

Until now, this ultra-fast “black hole wind” had only been detected coming from extremely bright accretion discs, which are at the limit of how much matter they can draw in. This time, XMM-Newton detected ultra-fast wind in a distinctly average galaxy which you could say was “only snacking.”

“You might expect very fast winds if a fan was turned on to its highest setting. In the galaxy we studied, called Markarian 817, the fan was turned on at a lower power setting, but there were still incredibly energetic winds being generated,” said U-M undergraduate researcher Miranda Zak, who played a central role in the research.

“We have observed a black hole to be flooding its host galaxy with enough gas to alter the nature of the host galaxy,” said U-M astronomer and lead author Jon Miller. “We have long inferred that this must happen because galactic centers have been swept of cold gas that could form new stars, and therefore have few new stars, but it has been very difficult to catch a black hole expelling gas with enough power to verify this key interaction. We have found an example, and it is particularly striking because the black hole doesn’t even have its throttle at max.”

X-rays blocked by the wind

Researchers 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 (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)
Researchers 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 (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)

Active galactic centers send out high-energy light, including X-rays. Markarian 817 stood out to the researchers because it went awfully quiet.

“The X-ray signal was so faint that I was convinced I was doing something wrong,” Zak said, after observing the galaxy using NASA’s Swift observatory.

Follow-up observations using ESA’s more sensitive X-ray telescope XMM-Newton revealed what was really happening: ultra-fast winds coming from the accretion disc were acting like a shroud, blocking out the X-rays sent out from the immediate surroundings of the black hole, called the corona.

These measurements were backed up by observations made with NASA’s NuSTAR telescope. A detailed analysis of the X-ray measurements showed that, far from sending out a single “puff” of gas, the center of Markarian 817 produced a gusty storm over a wide area in the accretion disc. The wind lasted for several hundreds of days and consisted of at least three distinct components, each moving at several percent of the speed of light.

This solves an open puzzle in our understanding of how black holes and the galaxies around them influence one another. There are many galaxies—including the Milky Way—that appear to have large regions around their centers in which very few new stars form. This could be explained by black hole winds that clear out the star-forming gas, but this only works if the winds are fast enough, sustained for long enough, and are generated by black holes with typical levels of activity.

“Many outstanding problems in the study of black holes are a matter of achieving detections through long observations that stretch over many hours to catch important events,” said Norbert Schartel, ESA’s XMM-Newton project scientist. “This highlights the prime importance of the XMM-Newton mission for the future. No other mission can deliver the combination of its high sensitivity and its ability to make long, uninterrupted observations