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Telescopes Catch Black Hole in NGC 3783 Launching 20% Light-Speed Wind

Researchers link the rapid ejection to magnetic reconnection, offering a new benchmark for understanding how active galactic nuclei drive feedback.

Overview

  • The international team recorded the outflow during a coordinated 10-day campaign, with XRISM providing the longest continuous view alongside XMM-Newton and five other missions.
  • For the first time, astronomers directly saw a high-speed ejection form and accelerate during an X-ray flare, establishing the event’s timing and evolution.
  • The wind reached about 60,000 kilometers per second and appeared within roughly a day of the flare as the burst faded.
  • Spectra indicate the expelled gas originated near a region about 50 times the black hole’s size in NGC 3783, whose central black hole is roughly 30 million solar masses and 130 million light-years away.
  • The findings, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, point to magnetic reconnection as the most likely launch mechanism and motivate follow-up studies to test how common such events are.