Talk about indigestion. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, scientists at Penn State and MIT found evidence of high-speed winds blowing away copious amounts of gas from the cores of two quasar galaxies thought to be powered by black holes. “The winds we measured imply that as much as a billion suns’ worth of material is blown away over the course of a quasar’s lifetime,” said Dr. George Chartas. He and his colleagues observed two quasars; with Chandra, the team observed a quasar called APM 08279+5255 and with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, they observed a quasar named PG1115+080. Both quasars are billions of light years away from Earth. However, APM 08279+5255 was naturally magnified by a factor of about 100 and PG1115+080 by a factor of about 25 through a process called gravitational lensing, the same phenomenon responsible for the spectacular Einstein Cross. Essentially, their light, while en route to us, was distorted and magnified by the gravity of intervening galaxies acting like telescope lenses. With the natural boost in magnification, coupled with the X-ray observatories’ abilities, the scientists could ascertain several key properties in the quasar light, such as the speed of the gas that absorbed the light, as well as the material’s proximity to the black hole. The team found the first observational evidence of a wind component transporting a substantial amount of carbon, oxygen and iron into the interstellar and intergalactic medium. The wind was moving at 40 percent light speed, considerably faster than predicted; you can download the 700KB movie at a considerably slower speed.
Thus supermassive black holes, notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, might also help seed interstellar space with elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron that are necessary for life.