Tohoku University-led astronomers used the XRISM X-ray satellite to measure violent turbulence around the quasar H1821+643, carrying about 100 times more energy than earlier estimates.

Black holes are famous for swallowing things. Anything that strays too close, including light, cannot escape. But the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies also push matter outward, driving powerful winds and jets that can reach far beyond the regions they feed on.

A new study suggests that these outflows can be far more powerful, and reach far farther, than astronomers had thought. Writing in Nature Astronomy, a team led by researchers at Tohoku University in Japan reports that gas around one of the brightest black holes in the nearby universe is being churned by turbulence carrying about 100 times more energy than previous estimates, across a region extending roughly 300,000 light-years.

“Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds,” said Satoshi Yamada, an assistant professor at Tohoku University’s Frontier Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences.

A quasar in a crowd

The team, which included researchers from Kanazawa University and Tokyo Metropolitan University, observed a quasar called H1821+643, about 3.4 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the universe. They are powered by supermassive black holes that are rapidly consuming gas, which heats up and glows intensely as it spirals inward.

H1821+643 is unusual because it sits at the center of a galaxy cluster, a vast collection of galaxies bound together by gravity. The space between the galaxies in a cluster is filled with extremely hot, thin gas, at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, that glows in X-rays. That gas typically contains more ordinary matter than all of the cluster’s stars combined.

Astronomers have long suspected that black holes at the centers of clusters help keep this gas hot. Without some source of heating, the densest gas near the center should cool and collapse into enormous numbers of new stars, yet far fewer stars form there than simple models predict. Energy pumped out by the central black hole, a process known as feedback, is the leading explanation.

Measuring motion with X-rays

To study the gas, the team used XRISM, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, a satellite led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in collaboration with NASA and with participation from the European Space Agency. Launched in 2023, XRISM carries an instrument called Resolve that can measure the energies of X-rays with exceptional precision.

That precision lets astronomers measure how gas is moving. When gas moves toward or away from an observer, or churns in many directions at once, the X-ray emission lines produced by its atoms shift and broaden. By analyzing the emission lines from iron ions in the cluster gas, the team could measure the motion of the gas around H1821+643.

A predecessor mission, the Japanese satellite Hitomi, made a similar measurement of the Perseus galaxy cluster in 2016 before the spacecraft was lost. It found the gas there to be surprisingly calm, a result that raised questions about how central black holes deliver their energy.

Violent turbulence

Around H1821+643, XRISM found the opposite. The hot gas was not static but was being violently dispersed over a wide area by turbulence. The disturbed gas extended about 300,000 light-years beyond the host galaxy, well beyond the region where black hole winds had been thought to act.

The energy involved was enormous. The turbulent energy was about 100 times greater than previous estimates, equivalent to several billion supernova explosions.

Yamada said that black hole winds had been thought to stay largely within their host galaxies. “For the first time, we have shown that black holes influence the broader cosmic environment through a shock wave of astonishing power,” he said.

According to the release, the findings show that black holes drive gas flows and transport large amounts of energy across space. The paper’s title describes the process as quasar-mode feedback, in which the energy comes from a black hole that is actively and brightly feeding, rather than from the radio jets associated with quieter black holes.

Small engine, vast reach

The scale of the result is striking. A supermassive black hole is tiny compared with its host galaxy, more than 100 million times smaller than the galaxy’s radius, according to the release. Yet the energy it releases appears able to stir gas across a region far larger than the galaxy itself.

That has implications for how galaxies and clusters evolve. If black holes can heat and stir gas on such scales, they may play a larger role than expected in regulating star formation and in spreading heavy elements, such as the iron used in the measurement, through the space between galaxies.

The result comes from a single, unusually powerful quasar, and it is not yet clear how typical it is. The researchers say future observations should clarify how black holes affect their surroundings and how matter and elements circulate through the cosmos. The release does not list the paper’s authors or funders.

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Notes

1. “Vigorous turbulence driven by quasar-mode feedback in a cluster core.” Nature Astronomy, 28 July 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02939-x.
2. Tohoku University. “Black hole ‘blast’ reaches 300,000 light years.” EurekAlert!, 29 July 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1137999.

Featured image: File image of a black hole illustration. Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)