For the first time, astronomers have watched a super-massive black hole produce winds reaching 20 per cent of the speed of light within hours of an X-ray flare—behaviour almost identical to a solar coronal mass ejection, a massive burst of plasma and magnetic field released from the Sun’s corona.
The outburst occurred in July 2024 in the core of galaxy NGC 3783, 130 million light-years away. ESA’s XMM-Newton and Japan’s XRISM spacecraft recorded a sharp spike in hard X-rays, followed within 12 hours by the appearance of gas racing outward at roughly 60,000 km s⁻¹ (about 57,000 km s⁻¹ in the earlier analysis). The wind persisted for three days before fading.
Lead author Liyi Gu (SRON Netherlands) says magnetic-field reconnection—similar to the process that triggers solar flares—appears to have powered the event. “We’ve seen how a rapid burst of X-ray light immediately triggers ultra-fast winds, forming in just a single day,” Gu notes. The study appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The black hole tips the scales at 28 million solar masses and was already known for flickering X-ray activity. During the 10-day XRISM exposure—the longest continuous observation the mission has made—the team also detected softer X-ray peaks that coincided with the wind’s launch, indicating the flare and outflow are causally linked.
Co-author Erik Kuulkers (ESA) says the discovery shows “solar and high-energy physics may work in surprisingly familiar ways throughout the Universe.” The result strengthens the idea that super-massive black holes can regulate star formation in their host galaxies by expelling gas, a feedback process previously inferred only from slower, radiation-driven winds.
Seven satellites—XRISM, XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, Chandra, Swift, NICER and Hubble—monitored the galaxy simultaneously, mapping the wind’s velocity, ionisation and distance from the black hole (about 50 times its event-horizon radius). The team concludes that magnetic, not radiative, forces dominate the acceleration, offering a new laboratory for studying extreme plasma physics.
Future XRISM observations will test whether such flare-triggered UFOs are common or require special conditions, refining models of how galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve.