An ancient supermassive black hole is blowing galaxy-destroying winds, the James Webb Space Telescope finds

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered the first strong “galaxy-sized” wind blowing from a supermassive black hole-powered quasar. The strong wind pushes gas and dust out of its galaxy at incredible speeds, killing star formation in its parent galaxy.

This quasar, called J1007+2115, is so far away that it can only be seen 700 million years after the Big Bang – when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just about 5% of its current age. This makes J1007+2115 only the third earliest quasar ever seen, but it is the earliest quasar ever observed to emit a strong, galaxy-sized wind.

However, this quasar's outflows are notable for more than just their age. J1007+2115's winds extend from the black hole at its source over an incredible 7,500 light-years, the equivalent of about 25 solar systems lined up side by side. The matter they transport each year is equivalent to 300 suns at speeds 6,000 times the speed of light, researchers said.

“It is the third earliest and third furthest quasar known today, powered by a growing supermassive black hole,” Weizhe Liu, discovery team leader and researcher at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. “To our knowledge, this galaxy-sized, quasar-driven wind is currently the earliest known.”

Related: How black hole-powered quasars in the early universe destroyed neighboring galaxies

The winds from this central, supermassive black hole could even be powerful enough to “kill” the parent galaxy, through which it sweeps at 6,000 times the speed of sound, depriving it of the material needed to birth new stars.

How supermassive black holes get wind

All large galaxies are believed to have a supermassive black hole at their heart, with a mass millions and billions of times greater than that of the Sun. But not all of these black holes power quasars, the brightest light sources in the cosmos.

That's because some supermassive black holes don't have large amounts of gas and dust surrounding them to feed on. For example, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is quiet and faint.

Other supermassive black holes are surrounded by an abundance of material that swirls around them in a flattened cloud called an accretion disk, gradually feeding them. The enormous gravitational influence of the central black hole causes strong friction in the accretion disks, heating this material and causing it to glow brightly.

These regions, called active galactic nuclei (AGNs), are so bright that they can outshine the combined light of all the stars in the surrounding galaxy. When observed from great distances, these regions are called “quasars.”

The strong radiation emitted by accretion disks has another effect: it displaces matter such as gas and dust from the AGN's surroundings. These quasar winds can also push gas and dust away from the larger galaxy that hosts the quasar.

An artist's impression in infrared light of a quasar-driven wind emanating from the core of a distant galaxy. (Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld)

Using JWST, researchers were able to determine that material in J1007+2115's quasar winds was moving at an incredible 4.7 million miles per hour (7.6 million km/h). As you can imagine, such strong and far-reaching winds transport a large amount of matter. Liu said that J1007+2115's quasar winds transport material with a mass equivalent to 300 suns every year.

The galaxy where J1007+2115 is located is rich in dense molecular gas and dust, the building blocks of stars, the JWST shows. The galaxy forms stars at a rate of about 80 to 250 solar masses each year. But this galaxy's light has been traveling to us for 13.1 billion years, meaning it's probably very different now. Thanks in particular to these quasar winds, the starburst activity may not have lasted long.

A black background with white, yellow and blue spots, one spot magnified by two dusty red boxes

A James Webb Space Telescope image of quasar J0148. (Image credit: NASA/Yue, et al.)

The ejection of gas and dust by these quasar winds will also disrupt the food supply for the supermassive black hole that powers them. This means the growth of the supermassive black hole, with an estimated mass of a billion suns, may also have stopped.

“The wind pushes a large amount of gas outward,” Liu said. “This could suppress the galaxy's star-forming activity, which requires gas to form stars, and also the growth of the supermassive black hole itself, which also requires the accretion of gas.”

This could mean that this early galaxy is now a dead galaxy and is not growing much as its star-forming material is removed and star formation is restricted.

Related: The brightest quasar ever seen is powered by a black hole that eats “a sun a day.”

The team isn't finished studying quasar winds and studying their influence on their home galaxies. They will continue to hunt them and perhaps even discover more that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

“Our goal now is to look for more such galaxy-sized, quasar-driven winds in the region
Very early universe and learn about their properties as a population,” Liu concluded.

A pre-printed version of the team's research is available in the arXiv paper archive.

An ancient supermassive black hole is blowing galaxy-destroying winds, the James Webb Space Telescope finds

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