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Black Hole Winds Carry 100 Times More Energy Than Once Thought, Study Finds

A Tohoku University-led team using Japan's XRISM satellite found that winds from a supermassive black hole carry about 100 times more energy than previously estimated, reaching roughly 300,000 light-years beyond its…

Step by step

  1. 1

    Black hole consumes gas at galaxy's center

  2. 2

    Consumption drives powerful gas winds outward

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    Winds stir turbulence in surrounding hot gas

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    Turbulence reaches 300,000 light-years beyond galaxy

A black hole's winds can reach far beyond the galaxy that hosts it, a new Tohoku University-led study has found. Using Japan's X-ray astronomy satellite XRISM, the team found the winds carry about 100 times more energy than earlier estimates suggested, extending roughly 300,000 light-years beyond the host galaxy — challenging the idea such winds stay confined to their galaxies.

Satoshi Yamada, assistant professor at Tohoku University's Frontier Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences (FRIS), led the team with colleagues from Kanazawa University, Tokyo Metropolitan University and other institutions. "Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds," Yamada said. "These winds were thought to be contained within the galaxy, but our study revealed that the force is immensely more powerful than previously understood."

The team observed H1821+643, an extremely luminous object powered by a supermassive black hole consuming gas, in the constellation Draco about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth. The black hole sits at the center of a galaxy cluster and stirs the surrounding hot, X-ray-emitting gas. Researchers analyzed iron-ion emission lines to measure how the gas was moving.

XRISM's precise measurements showed the high-temperature gas around the black hole is far from stationary: spreads it violently across a vast region, reaching beyond the host galaxy to about 300,000 light-years. The energy carried by this turbulence was roughly 100 times larger than earlier estimates — equivalent to several billion explosions, which occur when stars reach the end of their lives.

"For the first time, we have shown that black holes influence the broader cosmic environment through a shock wave of astonishing power," Yamada said. "Black holes are key drivers of gas flows and motion in space, transporting vast amounts of energy to different regions of the cosmos." The study, "Vigorous turbulence driven by quasar-mode feedback in a cluster core," appeared in Nature Astronomy on July 28, 2026.

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#black holes#XRISM#quasar#Tohoku University#X-ray astronomy#Japan
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