X-ray spacecraft watches monster black hole wake up and fire cosmic bullets at starburst galaxy

The joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission XRISM has spotted a monster black hole awakening in a distant "starburst" galaxy.

The research is revolutionary to black hole science, because it represents the first observation of the exact stage at which "winds" from a black hole begin to shape an entire galaxy.

Thus, the "switching on" of this supermassive black hole's powerful outflows could help scientists better understand how these cosmic titans and the intense winds of matter that flow from them influence their home galaxies, and how galaxies and their incumbent and dominant central supermassive black holes evolve in unison.

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The team behind this research studied the supermassive black hole IRAS 05189-2524 using XRISM (the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) and its onboard, sophisticated X-ray spectroscopic instruments. This work revealed bullet-like outflows blasting from the black hole's vicinity at speeds up to around 14% the speed of light.

The team found that these black hole bullets carried with them energy 100 times greater than that of slower molecular winds that spread through the distant galaxy, which is the result of a recent merger and is currently in the midst of intense star formation.

The energetic nature of these outflows shows they are more than capable of redirecting the evolution of this galaxy.

Supermassive black holes and galaxies grow up together

when it was created via a merger between two progenitor galaxies. This collision delivered a vast amount of gas and dust, which triggered an intense bout of star formation, referred to as starburst.

Not all the matter in the accretion disk is fed to the supermassive black hole, though. Some is channeled to the black hole's poles, from where it is blasted out as powerful jets. Other matter is blown away by intense black hole winds.

These factors can push gas and dust away from the AGN, starving the black hole, and away from the host galaxy as a whole. This has the effect of "killing" the galaxy by cutting off star formation. This leads to a quiet phase in the galaxy, now with a settled elliptical shape, without star formation, and with a slumbering black hole.

IRAS 05189-2524 presents a unique opportunity for scientists to study this process, as it is in the late stages of merging, with an active starburst ongoing and an active supermassive black hole in an AGN.

The scientists not only studied these black hole bullets in great detail but also found that this supermassive black hole is still voraciously feeding. In fact, this violent consumption of matter is close to the theoretical limit for such a black hole. The team expects the outflows of matter from this black hole to intensify, eventually killing star formation in this galaxy.

The researchers hope to further study IRAS 05189-2524 with XRISM, as well as collect observations with the forthcoming NewAthena spacecraft, set to be the largest X-ray observatory ever built.

The new results will soon appear in a special edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.