Gas clouds in a distant galaxy are being pushed between nearby stars at more than 10,000 miles per second by bursts of radiation from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The discovery helps shed light on how active black holes can continually shape their galaxies, encouraging or stopping the development of new stars.

A team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor Kathryn Grier and new graduate student Robert Wheatley discovered the accelerating gas using years of data collected from a quasar, a particularly bright and turbulent black hole billions of light-years away. Volopas constellation. They presented their findings today at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison.

Scientists believe that black holes are located at the centers of most galaxies. Quasars are supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of matter pulled by the black hole’s immense gravity.

“Material in this disk is falling into the black hole all the time, and the friction from this pulling and pulling heats the disk and makes it very, very hot and very, very bright,” Grier says. “These quasars are truly bright and their emissions cover almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum because there is a wide temperature range from the interior of the disk to its farthest reaches.”

Bright light makes quasars nearly as old as the Universe (13 billion light-years away) visible, and their wide radiation range makes them particularly useful for astronomers to study the early Universe.

The researchers used eight years of observations of the quasar called SBS 1408+544 collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, known as the Black Hole Mapper Echo Mapping Project. They tracked winds of gaseous carbon and detected light from a quasar that wasn’t there—light absorbed by the gas. But instead of being absorbed at the exact point of the spectrum that marks carbon, the shadow moved further away from home with each new look at SBS 1408+544.

“This change tells us that the gas is moving faster and faster all the time,” Wheatley says. “The wind is accelerating because it is being pushed by radiation escaping from the accretion disk.”

Scientists including Grier have previously suggested that they have seen wind acceleration from black hole accretion disks, but this has not yet been confirmed by multiple observations. The new results were obtained from approximately 130 observations of SBS 1408+544 over nearly a decade, allowing the team to determine the velocity increase with high confidence.

Winds expelling gas from a quasar interest astronomers because they are one way that supermassive black holes influence the evolution of the galaxies surrounding them.

“If they are energetic enough, the winds can extend into the host galaxy where they can have a significant impact,” says Wheatley.

Depending on conditions, quasar winds can create pressure that compresses gas and accelerates the birth of a star in the host galaxy. Or it could clean up the fuel and prevent a potential star from forming.

“Supermassive black holes are big, but compared to their galaxies, they are actually very small,” Grier says. “This doesn’t mean they can’t ‘talk’ to each other, and it’s some way of one talking to the other that we need to consider when modeling the effects of such black holes.”

The study was published on SBS 1408+544 Astrophysical JournalThey included staff from York University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Arizona and others.