ultra fast outflow

In a village smithy, the blacksmith pumps the bellows, and sparks fly into the darkness. So too in the galaxy AEON-z5, an active nucleus, like a red-hot forge, hurls metal-enriched material far beyond the stellar disk. The James Webb Space Telescope caught this process just a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy.

In active galactic nuclei, supermassive black holes are surrounded by a dense ring of dust that acts like a curtain: it hides everything happening at the center. If a star ventures too close to the black hole, tidal forces tear it apart, and the resulting flare is usually visible in optical and X-ray light.

A harbor lives by the tide schedule. Water rises and falls, and with it everything changes: the level at the dock, the composition of the sediment on the bottom, even the salinity in the far corners. A galaxy works similarly, except instead of water it has gas, and instead of the Moon, it has its own stars and neighboring clouds.

A black hole with a mass of 35,000 Suns drifts through a galaxy's gas like a barge through fog. Its gravity rakes the material ahead of it, leaving a dense trail behind — a wake of gas. Some of that gas gets pulled into the black hole, and it grows.

Pulsar PSR J1740+1000 is a city-sized star spinning faster than a kitchen blender. After a supernova explosion, it left behind a dense core that accelerates particles to near-light speeds. These particles fly into space, and previously it was thought they scatter in all directions, like splashes from a stone thrown into water.

In the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster lives the galaxy NGC 1275. From its core blows a wind of superheated gas — astronomers have now seen it in detail for the first time. The wind shows up in the glow of hydrogen and oxygen. It accelerates to 570 kilometers per second — faster than a bullet.

A whirlpool gulps down water, but splashes most of it back out. That's roughly how a black hole behaves when too much matter falls onto it. In a new study, astrophysicists ran 32 computer simulations to understand how a black hole's parameters — mass, spin, and "appetite"—control these cosmic fountains.

A globular cluster, a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars, plows through a galaxy like a bullet through water. In ordinary dark matter (the invisible mass that holds galaxies together), it should quickly lose speed due to dynamical friction.

At the centers of many galaxies lurk giant black holes. They are surrounded by dense clouds of hot plasma that emit a powerful X-ray glow.

Deep beneath the ice of the South Pole, nearly two and a half kilometers down, an unusual telescope is at work. It is not pointed at the sky but through the Earth. Its quarry: neutrinos, nearly elusive particles that pass through planets and stars without interacting with anything.

295 000 meters per second. Not even particles in solar coronal ejecta move that fast. But at the center of the galaxy cluster H1821+643, hot gas does exactly that. The quasar at its heart takes a breath, and its breath stirs everything around for 60 thousand light-years.

In 1,433 pairs of galaxies scattered across the sky, astronomers noticed an unusual pattern. Neighbors located 'above' or 'below' a massive stellar system contain up to a quarter more oxygen than those lying in the plane of its disk.

Eight hundred million years after the Big Bang, and at the heart of a young galaxy a monstrous engine is already throbbing. A black hole with a mass of ten billion suns devours matter so greedily that its radiation should outshine everything around it. But outside, silence.

At the center of a distant galaxy, where a supermassive black hole weighing a hundred million suns spins, space is threaded with magnetic fields. They coil into tight vortices, like a drain in a sink, but instead of water, there's plasma whipped up to near-light speeds.

The JWST spectrograph caught a barely perceptible dip in the spectrum of a distant galaxy — two lines, like shadows cast by cold gas. These are the sodium lines, the very yellow light of streetlamps. Here, at the edge of the visible Universe, they betray the slow exhalation of a galaxy returning matter to space.

A branch falls into a whirlpool. It gets spun and broken, but sometimes a powerful fountain of water bursts from the center. Similarly, a black hole tears apart a passing star, and occasionally a blinding plasma jet, a jet, shoots into space.

Ten billion years ago, the universe was speckled with strange crimson sparks. The JWST spotted them in images at distant redshifts — compact sources blazing like entire galaxies yet no larger than a tiny central region. Astronomers nicknamed them “little red dots.” Their nature long defied explanation.

The event horizon's edge is never calm. Quantum vacuum boils there, and particles sometimes burst out of this foam: that is how Stephen Hawking in 1974 discovered black hole radiation, forever linking gravity with quantum field theory.

Fifteen years of observations by the Gamma radiation telescope Fermi have revealed a crack in the floor of the Galaxy.

In the quiet of cold molecular clouds, where interstellar gas under gravity condenses into dense clumps, the birth of massive stars is one of the great puzzles of astrophysics.

In 1933, Fritz Zwicky first spoke of an invisible mass holding galaxy clusters together. Decades later, Vera Rubin mapped galactic rotation, revealing the ghostly presence of dark matter. Today we know it pervades the cosmos, but its particle nature remains elusive.

In 2017, the Antarctic neutrino telescope IceCube detected a particle with an energy of about 290 TeV arriving from deep space.

Massive gas outflows from active galactic nuclei are a key regulator of galactic evolution. They sweep out the interstellar medium, quench star formation, and dictate the growth of supermassive black holes.

A world where a year lasts just one and a half Earth days, and the star in its sky is hundreds of times larger than our Sun. This is KELT-9 b — a gas giant heated to temperatures at which iron vaporizes. Its atmosphere is not just hot; it is literally boiling away into space, like steam rising from a giant cauldron.

Nearly a decade and a half ago, the Fermi gamma-ray telescope spotted mysterious "bubbles" — giant plasma blobs, as if inflated by invisible lungs, towering tens of thousands of light-years from the Galactic center.

A vast city lights new streetlamps every night. But then a hurricane sweeps in, rips all the fuel from the warehouses, and the lamps go out one by one. Something similar has been spotted by astronomers in a galaxy whose light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us.

If a black hole spins quickly, it can hold a cloud of ultralight particles around it, so light that their mass almost vanishes. They arrange themselves in layers, like electrons in an atom, only here gravity does the job instead of electric forces. This structure stores energy, like a coiled spring.

Gravitational waves — the cosmic tremors from distant cataclysms — are so faint that detecting them is like trying to hear a whisper in a hurricane. But a black hole can amplify that whisper many times over.

In 1963, Maarten Schmidt unraveled the nature of quasars — distant active nuclei outshining entire galaxies. Since then, we've learned that at their hearts lurk supermassive black holes, converting infalling matter into blinding light.

In April 2021, in a galaxy 35 megaparsecs away, supernova SN 2021foa erupted. It immediately puzzled astronomers: its spectrum feverishly switched between hydrogen and helium lines — as if the star, in agony, was frantically shedding its outer layers.

Water plunges into an abyss, but part of it shoots back up — churning and foaming at the very edge. That's roughly how gas behaves as it flows onto a supermassive black hole when its stream becomes too dense. In a new study, scientists traced this picture using computer simulations.

A tiny black hole, no larger than an atomic nucleus, hovers in a cloud of hydrogen. It doesn't swallow everything around it; instead, it slowly radiates away, losing mass with every moment.

At the center of many galaxies sits a supermassive black hole. When gas falls onto it, the gas heats up and shines brighter than an entire galaxy: this is an active galactic nucleus. Sometimes a true hurricane erupts from there: a stream of ionized gas racing at tens of percent of the speed of light.

A river flows toward a whirlpool, but a dam with a notch blocks the way. Most water piles up before the dam, but some, gaining height, leaps over it and falls straight into the funnel. So it is with gas in a galaxy: it streams toward the center but hits a ring of stars and gas, like a dam. Usually, everything stops there, swirling into a dense vortex.

A powerful searchlight shines through thick fog. The beam itself is invisible, but the fog begins to glow faintly, and gives away the searchlight's presence.

In a dense cloud of gas and dust where giant stars are born, the ALMA telescope has spotted something familiar. Four thin gas jets shoot out from the same region, each leaving behind a chain of bright knots, like a dashed line.

At the heart of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster floats a bubble of hot plasma the size of several galaxies. It rises like a giant hot-air balloon in the atmosphere, leaving a wake behind it — a region where gas is set in motion.

A fountain shoots from the center of the city at a speed thousands of times faster than a courier bike. Such a 'fountain'—a stream of gas accelerated to 5500 kilometers per second — has been spotted by astronomers in the galaxy GLIMPSED-329380.

An ordinary sheet of black phosphorus looks like a layered cake of atoms. If you shine a regular lamp on it, nothing special happens: the electrons sit still, like spectators in a dark theater. But a short laser flash lasting millionths of a billionth of a second shakes up that theater.

The black hole MAXI J1810-222 behaves like a giant vacuum cleaner with a reverse valve: it pulls in matter, but some of it gets spat back out into space. This "backflow"—a stellar wind — had been spotted by astronomers before, but only as a blurry smudge in X-rays.