Artist’s impression of the supermassive black hole PDS 456. High-speed winds—illustrated in white—are being ejected from the vicinity of the black hole. (Credit: JAXA)
Dr. Luigi Gallo and postdoc researchers Dr. Yerong Xu and Dr. Adam Gonzalez in the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Saint Mary’s were part of an international research team led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that again published in the journal Nature.
Their paper explains that wind, or outflow of gas ejected from supermassive black holes is behaving in an unexpected way. The black hole expels gas in bullet-like clumps, instead of in a smooth, continuous manner.
Understanding the impact of this wind is key to understanding both the creation and evolution of black holes and their galaxies.
The team at Saint Mary’s is part of an international X-ray space observatory project called XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with NASA, and supported by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). (Image credit JAXA)