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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered the first powerful “galaxy-sized” wind blowing from a supermassive quasar powered by a black hole. Powerful winds push gas and dust from its galaxy at incredible speeds, killing stars in its host galaxy.
This quasar, called J1007+2115, is so distant that it is considered to have been only 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 5% of its current age. Although this makes J1007+2115 the third oldest quasar ever observed, it is the first quasar ever observed with strong, galaxy-sized winds flowing from it.
However, the outflows from this quasar aren't just remarkable because of their antiquity. The wind from J1007+2115 extends from the black hole at its source a staggering 7,500 light-years, the equivalent of about 25 solar systems lined up side by side. The researchers said that the material they transform each year is equivalent to 300 suns at speeds equivalent to 6,000 times the speed of light.
“It is the third-oldest quasar and the third-most distant quasar powered by an accreting supermassive black hole known today,” discovery team leader and University of Arizona researcher Wei Zhi Liu told Space.com. “To our knowledge, these galaxy-scale quasar-driven winds are currently the oldest known winds.”
Related to: How black hole-powered quasars killed neighboring galaxies in the early universe
The winds from this central feeding black hole could be strong enough to “kill” the host galaxy it is penetrating at 6,000 times the speed of sound, depriving it of the material needed to birth new stars.
How do supermassive black holes get winds?
All large galaxies are thought to contain at their core a supermassive black hole, with a mass between millions and billions of times the mass of the Sun. But not all of these black holes power quasars, the brightest sources of light in the universe.
This is because some supermassive black holes are not surrounded by huge amounts of gas and dust on which they can feed. For example, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is quiet and dim.
Other supermassive black holes are surrounded by a wealth of material swirling around them in a flat cloud called an accretion disk that gradually feeds them. The massive gravitational influence of the central black hole causes strong friction in the accretion disks, heating up the material and causing it to glow brightly.
These regions are called active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and are so bright that they can outshine the combined light of every star in the surrounding galaxy. When seen from long distances, these regions are called quasars.
The powerful radiation from accretion disks has another effect as well: it pushes material such as gas and dust away from the vicinity of active galactic nuclei. These quasar winds can also push gas and dust away from the broader galaxy hosting the quasar.
With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers were able to see that the material in the winds of the quasar from J1007+2115 is traveling at an amazing speed of 4.7 million miles per hour (7.6 million kilometers per hour). As you might imagine, such strong, far-reaching winds carry a huge amount of matter. Liu said quasar winds from J1007+2115 carry material with a mass equivalent to 300 suns every year.
The galaxy containing J1007+2115 is rich in dense molecular gas and dust, the building blocks of stars, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy forms stars at a rate of 80 to 250 solar masses each year. But light from that galaxy has been traveling to us for 13.1 billion years, which means it would likely be very different now. In particular, thanks to these quasar winds, starburst activity may not have continued for long.
Blowing gas and dust through the quasar's winds would also cut off food supplies to the supermassive black hole driving it. This means that the growth of the supermassive black hole, which has an estimated mass equivalent to a billion suns, may have also stopped.
“The wind is pushing a large amount of gas out,” Liu said. “This could suppress star formation activity in the galaxy, which needs gas to form stars, as well as the growth of the supermassive black hole itself, which also needs gas to accumulate.”
This would mean that this early galaxy is now a dead galaxy and is not growing as much as star-forming material has been purged from it and star birth has been curtailed.
Related to: The brightest quasar ever gets its energy from a black hole that devours a 'sun every day'
The team is not finished studying quasar winds and investigating their effect on their host galaxies. They will continue their pursuit, perhaps discovering more of what existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
“We now aim to search for more of these galactic-scale winds driven by quasars in space
“The very early universe and learning about its properties as inhabitants,” Liu concluded.
A preprint of the team's research is available in the paper repository arXiv.
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