How monster black holes are kept in check by 220,000,000mph streams of plasma

How monster black holes are kept in check by 220,000,000mph streams of plasma | Mail Online:


Black holes – and indeed the galaxies they’re found in – are reined in by huge streams of highly ionised plasma, researchers have discovered.

Francesco Tombesi from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, using data gathered from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray Observatory, has discovered that these streams, called ‘ultra-fast outflows’ exert a massive influence on the number of stars in galaxies and the size of black holes at their centre.

The study follows a baffling observation from astronomers in recent years – that there was a strong correlation between the mass of a black hole and the number of stars in the entire galaxy.