New data from the XRISM mission indicate that winds from supermassive black holes can expel gas from giant galaxies and limit future star formation.
University of Michigan researcher Xin "Cindy" Xiang analyzed XRISM observations of the galaxy NGC 4151, located more than 50 million light-years from Earth. The findings show that the strongest outflows occur roughly 10,000 seconds after X-ray flares when the emission is hard but faint.
XRISM, a joint project of JAXA, NASA, and ESA, launched in 2023 and began science operations in fall 2024. Its improved resolution allowed Xiang to resolve fine details of the accretion disk outflows that earlier instruments could not.
Xiang presented the results, including a new timing metric called cindicity, at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena. The work supports the idea that black hole winds remove raw material for stars and may explain why the largest galaxies contain less stellar mass than models predict.