NGC 4945, a beautiful spiral galaxy over 12 million light-years away, hides a ferocious secret: a ravenous black hole at its center.
This supermassive beast doesn’t just consume matter — it blasts it back out at incredible speeds, launching winds that escape the galaxy itself.
This featured European Southern Observatory (ESO) image showcases the striking spiral galaxy NGC 4945. Located over 12 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, the galaxy might look calm from a distance, but it’s far from quiet.
Like most galaxies, NGC 4945 has a supermassive black hole at its center. While some black holes, such as the one in the Milky Way, consume matter slowly, this one is devouring material at a much more intense rate. Using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed this black hole not just feeding, but also violently expelling matter.
Instead of swallowing everything, it’s generating powerful, cone-shaped winds of gas and dust. These outflows, highlighted in red in an inset image over a wider view from the MPG/ESO La Silla telescope, are moving so rapidly that they are expected to escape the galaxy entirely and drift into intergalactic space.
These findings are part of a broader study examining how black hole-driven winds behave in nearby galaxies. Remarkably, the MUSE data reveal that these winds don’t slow down as they move outward. Instead, they accelerate as they travel away from the galactic center, gaining speed on their journey to the galaxy’s edge.
This process ejects potential star-forming material from a galaxy, suggesting that black holes control the fates of their host galaxies by dampening the stellar birth rate. It also shows that the more powerful black holes impede their own growth by removing the gas and dust they feed on, driving the whole system closer to a sort of galactic equilibrium. Now, with these new results, we are one step closer to understanding the acceleration mechanism of the winds responsible for shaping the evolution of galaxies and the history of the universe.
Reference: “Evidence of the fast acceleration of AGN-driven winds at kiloparsec scales” by Cosimo Marconcini, Alessandro Marconi, Giovanni Cresci, Filippo Mannucci, Lorenzo Ulivi, Giacomo Venturi, Martina Scialpi, Giulia Tozzi, Francesco Belfiore, Elena Bertola, Stefano Carniani, Elisa Cataldi, Avinanda Chakraborty, Quirino D’Amato, Enrico Di Teodoro, Anna Feltre, Michele Ginolfi, Bianca Moreschini, Nicole Orientale, Bartolomeo Trefoloni and Andrew King, 31 March 2025, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02518-6
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