There's a supermassive black hole out there blowing winds so strong that it's shutting down star formation in the nearby galaxy.
An artist’s impression of a quasar wind being launched off of the accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. Inset at right are two spectra from the quasar SBS 1408+544, showing the leftward shift of absorbed light that revealed the acceleration of gas pushed by quasar winds. Image: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss, Catherine Grier and the SDSS collaboration
There’s one monster out there—SBS 1408+544—that astronomers observed for over eight years. It was part of a long-term survey called the Black Hole Mapper Reverberation Mapping Project. That’s a Sloan Digital Sky Survey program that tracks activity at the hearts of these active black-hole-powered quasars. For SBS 1408+544, a team led by Wisconsin astronomers Catherine Grier and Robert Wheatley studied the wind-accelerated gas flowing from the quasar’s heart.
An image of the quasar SBS 1408+544, the blue dot in the center of the crosshairs. A supermassive black hole at the core powers the quasar. Image: Jordan Raddick and the SDSS collaborationSupersonic winds blasting out from a supermassive black hole indicate something energetic is going on there. That makes sense, since the black hole actively eats whatever crosses its event horizon from the accretion disk, according to Grier.
However, here’s what’s interesting—the lines appear “shifted” to a different spot on the spectrum in each observation. That indicates motion. “That shift tells us the gas is moving fast, and faster all the time,” says Wheatley. “The wind is accelerating because it’s being pushed by radiation that is blasted off of the accretion disk.”One side-effect of the high wind gusts from the supermassive black hole is on the star-forming regions of a galaxy.
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