Overview
- A peer-reviewed study in Astronomy & Astrophysics details the first clear capture of a flare-triggered ultrafast outflow’s onset and early evolution in NGC 3783.
- The outflow accelerated to about 60,000 kilometers per second—roughly 20% of light speed—emerging within roughly 12 to 24 hours of a bright X-ray burst.
- XRISM and XMM-Newton recorded simultaneous spectra during a 10-day campaign, with supporting observations from NuSTAR, Hubble, Chandra, Swift and NICER.
- The team concludes the launch was most consistent with magnetic reconnection, akin to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, rather than radiation pressure.
- The galaxy lies about 130 million light-years away and hosts a ~30-million-solar-mass black hole; signatures suggest the ejection arose from a region on the order of tens of black hole radii.