Quasars Archives - News@91��ɫ

Fastest and most furious ultraviolet wind near a black hole found by 91��ɫ researchers

sandramc — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:21:14 +0000

TORONTO, June 4, 2026 – A team led by 91��ɫ researchers has discovered the fastest wind near a supermassive black hole ever found at ultraviolet wavelengths, driven by the disc of matter, or quasar, surrounding the black hole. &�Բ��;

“This quasar has a black hole of 1.7 billion times the mass of the Sun. That’s typical. What’s not typical is that it has gas moving towards us at 30 per cent of the speed of light,” says of the Faculty of Science.   &�Բ��;

The , published by The American Astronomical Society. &�Բ��;

The research team includes 91��ɫ graduate student and lead author Lucas Seaton, graduate student Marianna Veltri, and undergraduate student Zezhou Zhu, along with colleagues from the University of Washington Bothell and other members of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) collaboration.

“This quasar, known as J2318 (Jay Twenty-Three Eighteen), can be found in the Great Square in the constellation of Pegasus,” says Seaton. “In terms of its speed, this quasar’s wind could be called a category 79 hurricane,” says Seaton. “Every category of hurricane is about 20 per cent faster than the category below it. Calling it category 79 gives an idea of just how fast it is, but of course this wind is unlike anything on Earth.” &�Բ��;

An artist's impression of a quasar. The black dot in the center represents the supermassive black hole at the center of the quasar. The red-and-yellow spiral surrounding it shows the disc of hot gas falling into the black hole. Some of this gas is ejected as the quasar's wind, which is shown in light blue. The size of the disc shown is comparable to the size of our Solar System. &�Բ��;Credit: , Nahks Tr'Ehnl, Nurten Filiz Ak

Astronomers have known for close to three decades that every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre, with a mass from millions to billions of times that of the Sun, although contrary to popular belief they do not eat everything in reach. Matter spiraling into one of these black holes forms a disc far bigger than Earth’s orbit around the Sun and hotter than the surface of the Sun. These discs of hot gas, called quasars, generate enough light to be seen across the observable universe and to drive winds from their surfaces.

“In quasars, we often see winds of gas pushed away from the black hole by the light of the quasar,” says Seaton. “The wind in J2318 can be seen at ultraviolet wavelengths at velocities up to 30 per cent the speed of light. Even faster winds can be seen at x-ray wavelengths, but J2318 is the fastest ever discovered at ultraviolet wavelengths.”

Unlike the differences in gas pressure that drive atmospheric winds on Earth, winds from quasars are pushed at least in part by light itself. Individual packets of light (called photons) bounce off or are absorbed by atoms in the gas and accelerate them.

“Quasars put out so many photons that those tiny pushes add up to extreme velocities,” says Seaton. “The problem is, the photons can also remove all the electrons from the atoms, making them invisible. How to push the gas to the speeds we see while keeping the carbon and silicon ions we see intact… it’s quite a puzzle.”

The discovery relied on data from two components of the SDSS, an international survey of the night sky to which hundreds of astronomers have contributed since its start in 1998, specifically, the SDSS-IV and the SDSS-V . Veltri flagged the quasar as potentially interesting in SDSS-V in 2023 while an undergrad student at 91��ɫ. After looking at it using software set up by Zhu, Hall realized it had an extremely fast wind.

“Canada has a share of the eight-meter-diameter (also known as Gemini North) in Hawai’i, and we immediately proposed observations with it. They succeeded in confirming its record-breaking wind velocity,” he says, adding that he often involves 91��ɫ undergraduates in research as part of his participation in the SDSS. &�Բ��;

He explains that “just as a rainbow spreads the Sun’s light into different wavelengths (colours), the SDSS spreads out the light from certain stars, galaxies, and quasars into what we call their ‘spectra’. From those spectra, with practice, students learn to spot unusual quasars. In the past, only PhD astronomers or graduate students studying for a PhD would have made a discovery like this, but the SDSS enables undergraduates to do so.”

Study co-author, Associate Professor Paola Rodríguez Hidalgo of the University of Washington at Bothell, adds: “Both Patrick and I have been working together and with undergraduate students thanks to the SDSS Faculty and Students Team (FAST) initiative that supports these collaborations. Initiatives like this allow students to focus on research while finishing their undergraduate studies. These students will be the next generation of scientists and are already making scientific discoveries.”

Co-author Liliana Flores, who worked with Professor Rodríguez Hidalgo as an undergraduate at UW Bothell and was a FAST participant, says she was thrilled to contribute to the study of this extreme outflow case. “I was in charge of fitting the absorption profiles in the quasar spectrum to determine their velocity and equivalent widths. Repeated observations revealed that the amount of absorbed light changes over time. Something in the wind conditions must be changing for that to happen.” &�Բ��;

Veltri assembled measurements of the brightness of the quasar from 20 years of surveys, starting with the original SDSS. That data shows that J2318 is slowly varying in brightness in a way indistinguishable from other quasars. Only by taking detailed measurements of spectra with SDSS was the wind in J2318 revealed.

Rodríguez Hidalgo calls the discovery exciting. “These extreme outflows carry incredible amounts of energy that can affect the galaxies around them. They serve as a sort of missing link: the elusive feedback between the active central region of a galaxy and the rest of the galaxy. While this process has been included in simulations of galaxy formation for decades, a lot more work needs to be done to understand it from observations and make sure the simulations handle it correctly.”

Searches are continuing for more extremely high velocity outflows from quasars, says Flores. “It won’t be easy to find a faster ultraviolet outflow than that of J2318, but we are continuing this search from the nearby universe to the most distant reaches of the universe that we can see.”

Joint with: &�Բ��;
Sloan Digital Sky Survey &�Բ��;
University of Washington Bothell &�Բ��;
The Pennsylvania State University (local only) &�Բ��;

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact: Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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Black hole wind is speeding up, new study finds

egamulin — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:15:05 +0000

Work by 91��ɫ astronomer and research colleagues in U.S. may provide clues into development of surrounding galaxies

TORONTO, June 11 2024 - Clouds of gas in a distant galaxy are being pushed faster and faster out among neighbouring stars by blasts of radiation from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s centre, a discovery that helps illuminate the way active black holes can continuously shape their galaxies by spurring on or snuffing out the development of new stars.

An image showing the intensity of light for the entire set of 130 spectra used in this study. Warmer or redder colours indicate more light, and bluer or cooler colours represent less light. Credit: Robert Wheatley, Catherine Grier and the SDSS collaboration

A team of researchers, including 91��ɫ Faculty of Science Professor and Physics and Astronomy Chair , revealed the accelerating gas through years of observations of a quasar — a black hole surrounded by a hot and bright disk of matter — some 30 billion light years away in the constellation Boötes.

Hall says that while this quasar acceleration has been seen before, including by researchers involved in this study, the level of detail here is unprecedented.

“We were able to make 130 observations over the course of eight years, so our confidence in this acceleration is quite high,” says Hall. “The difference in information could be compared to looking at two photographs at different points in time versus a movie.”

Black holes are believed to be situated at the centre of most galaxies. Quasars are supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of matter being pulled in by the black hole’s enormous gravitational power.

The research was led by University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomy professor Catherine Grier and recent graduate Robert Wheatley, and also included researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona, and others. and the findings are also being presented today at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“The material in that disk is always falling into the black hole, and the friction it feels heats up the disk and makes it very, very hot and very, very bright,” says Grier. “These quasars are really luminous and — because there’s a large range of temperatures from the interior to the far parts of the disk — their emission covers almost all of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

91��ɫ Astronomy Prof. Patrick Hall

The bright light makes visible quasars nearly as old as the universe (and as many as 13 billion light years away when their light was emitted), and the broad range of their radiation makes them particularly useful for astronomers to probe the early universe.

Researchers used more than eight years of observations of a quasar called SBS 1408+544, collected by a quasar monitoring program carried out by the now known as the Black Hole Mapper Reverberation Mapping Project. They tracked winds composed of gaseous carbon by spotting light from the quasar that was missing — light that was being absorbed by the gas. But instead of being absorbed at exactly the right spot in the spectrum that would indicate carbon, the shadow shifted farther from home with every new look.

“That shift tells us the gas is moving fast, and faster all the time,” says Wheatley. “We think the wind is accelerating because it’s being pushed by radiation that is blasted off of the accretion disk.”

The winds pushing gas out from the quasar are of interest to astronomers because they are a way in which the supermassive black holes might influence the evolution of the galaxies that surround them.

Depending on the circumstances, a quasar’s winds could supply pressure that squeezes gas together and speeds the birth of stars in its host galaxy. Or it could scour away that fuel and keep potential stars from forming.

To study quasars, astronomers look at their spectra, which is a measure of how much light the quasar gives off at each wavelength — from ultraviolet through the full visible spectrum from blue to red, and into infrared. A spectrum can reveal far more about a quasar than a simple telescope image — so by repeatedly measuring spectra over many years, astronomers can watch quasar light fluctuations and learn about the motion of the gas in the accretion disk, which can be used to determine the mass.

“Light has a force, so if you shine enough light on an object it can move,” says Hall. “We think that may be what's going on here, but it's not clear because I don't think we see enough of an increase in light to explain the acceleration we see. It's possible that wavelengths of ultraviolet light that we can’t observe directly are responsible, but right now it’s not clear. I look forward to seeing what this quasar does in the future.”

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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Next-gen astronomical survey makes its first observations toward understanding the cosmos

roshanp — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 16:55:14 +0000

TORONTO, Nov. 2, 2020 — The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) fifth generation collected its very first observations of the cosmos at 1:47 a.m. on Oct. 24. As the world's first all-sky time-domain spectroscopic survey, SDSS-V will provide groundbreaking insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies – like our own Milky Way – and the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centers.

The SDSS, an international consortium that includes 91��ɫ as an associate member, just-launched a fifth generation survey to continue the path-breaking tradition set by previous surveys with a focus on the ever-changing night sky and the physical processes that drive these changes, from flickers and flares of supermassive black holes to the back-and-forth shifts of stars being orbited by distant worlds. SDSS-V will provide the spectroscopic backbone needed to achieve the full science potential of satellites like NASA’s TESS, ESA’s Gaia, and the latest all-sky X-ray mission, eROSITA.

"My colleagues and I on the Black Hole Mapper team seek to understand how the matter swirling around supermassive black holes is organized,” says 91��ɫ Professor of the Faculty of Science who is part of the SDSS-V team. “These black holes can have dramatic effects on their surrounding galaxies, so they are part of the puzzle of understanding how our current Universe of galaxies came to be."

The SDSS has always relied heavily on phone and digital communication. But adapting to exclusively virtual communication tactics was a challenge, as was tracking global supply chains and laboratory availability at various university partners while they shifted in and out of lockdown during the final ramp-up to the survey’s start. Particularly inspiring were the project's expert observing staff, who worked in even-greater-than-usual isolation to shut down, and then reopen, the survey's mountain-top observatories.

“In a year when humanity has been challenged across the globe, I am so proud of the worldwide SDSS team for demonstrating—every day—the very best of human creativity, ingenuity, improvisation, and resilience. It has been a challenging period for the team, but I’m happy to say that the pandemic may have slowed us, but it has not stopped us,” says SDSS-V Director, Juna Kollmeier.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation made its first observations earlier this month. This image shows a sampling of data from those first SDSS-V data. The central sky image is a single field of SDSS-V observations. The purple circle indicates the telescope’s field-of-view on the sky, with the full Moon shown as a size comparison. SDSS-V simultaneously observes 500 targets at a time within a circle of this size. The left panel shows the optical-light spectrum of a quasar--a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, which is surrounded by a disk of hot, glowing gas. The purple blob is an SDSS image of the light from this disk, which in this dataset spans about 1 arcsecond on the sky, or the width of a human hair as seen from about 21 meters (63 feet) away. The right panel shows the image and spectrum of a white dwarf --the left-behind core of a low-mass star (like the Sun) after the end of its life. Image Credit: Hector Ibarra Medel, Jon Trump, Yue Shen, Gail Zasowski, and the SDSS-V Collaboration. Central background image: unWISE / NASA/JPL-Caltech / D.Lang (Perimeter Institute).

Funded primarily by member institutions, along with grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation, SDSS-V will focus on three primary areas of investigation, each exploring different aspects of the cosmos using different spectroscopic tools. Together these three project pillars – called “Mappers” – will observe more than six million objects in the sky, and monitor changes in more than a million of those objects over time.

The survey’s Local Volume Mapper will enhance our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution by probing the interactions between the stars that make up galaxies and the interstellar gas and dust that is dispersed between them. The Milky Way Mapper will reveal the physics of stars in our Milky Way, the diverse architectures of its star and planetary systems, and the chemical enrichment of our galaxy since the early universe. The Black Hole Mapper will measure masses and growth over cosmic time of the supermassive black holes that reside in the hearts of galaxies as well as the smaller black holes left behind when stars die.

"I've been affiliated with the SDSS since 2000 and my career of studying supermassive black holes began with SDSS data,” says Hall. “Now that 91��ɫ has secured a full membership for my research group, undergraduate and graduate students at 91��ɫ can join me in studying SDSS observations as soon as they arrive from the telescope."

The Black Hole Mapper was one of the first of the three Mappers to gather data.

“These early observations are already important for a wide range of science goals,” says SDSS-V Spokesperson Gail Zasowski of the University of Utah. “Even these first targets cover goals from mapping the inner regions of supermassive black holes and searching for exotic multiple-black hole systems, to studying nearby stars and their dead cores, to tracing the chemistry of potential planet-hosting stars across the Milky Way.”

SDSS-V will operate out of both Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, home of the survey’s original 2.5-meter telescope, and Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, where it uses the 2.5-meter du Pont telescope.

SDSS-V's first observations were gathered in New Mexico with existing SDSS instruments, as a necessary change of plans due to the pandemic. As laboratories and workshops around the world navigate safe reopening, SDSS-V's own suite of new innovative hardware is on the horizon---in particular, systems of automated robots to aim the fiber optic cables used to collect the light from the night sky. These will be installed at both observatories over the next year. New spectrographs and telescopes are also being constructed to enable the Local Volume Mapper observations.

"I was only a few years out of graduate school when I began work with the SDSS," says Hall. "Now I'm Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, but I'm just as excited about this survey as I was 20 years ago. I look forward to many more years of learning about our Galaxy and the Universe with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey!"

For more information, see the SDSS-V’s website at .

(Image can be downloaded here: )

Caption: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation made its first observations earlier this month. This image shows a sampling of data from those first SDSS-V data. The central sky image is a single field of SDSS-V observations. The purple circle indicates the telescope’s field-of-view on the sky, with the full Moon shown as a size comparison. SDSS-V simultaneously observes 500 targets at a time within a circle of this size. The left panel shows the optical-light spectrum of a quasar--a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, which is surrounded by a disk of hot, glowing gas. The purple blob is an SDSS image of the light from this disk, which in this dataset spans about 1 arcsecond on the sky, or the width of a human hair as seen from about 21 meters (63 feet) away. The right panel shows the image and spectrum of a white dwarf --the left-behind core of a low-mass star (like the Sun) after the end of its life. Image Credit: Hector Ibarra Medel, Jon Trump, Yue Shen, Gail Zasowski, and the SDSS-V Collaboration. Central background image: unWISE / NASA/JPL-Caltech / D.Lang (Perimeter Institute).

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91��ɫ champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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Quasars Archives - News@91��ɫ

Fastest and most furious ultraviolet wind near a black hole found by 91��ɫ researchers

Black hole wind is speeding up, new study finds

Next-gen astronomical survey makes its first observations toward understanding the cosmos

Fastest and most furious ultraviolet wind near a black hole found by 91��ɫ researchers