Quasars Create Tsunamis Of Energy In Their Galaxies

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Quasars are supermassive black holes that can be found on the cores of galaxies on steroids. They gobble up matter and spit out enormous amounts of energy.

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Image by Garik Barseghyan from Pixabay

Whenever there is a quasar in the center of a galaxy the galaxy suffers. Remember, it is still a supermassive black hole that feeds up on all surrounding matter with no regard to its galaxy. This heats up the surrounding cosmic gas so much that it starts to glow a thousand times more than the galaxy itself. While that might sound like it is enough, But quasars sometime go up to eleven. If they do their energy rampages through the galaxy as a tsunami and accelerates particles close to the speed of light.

Winds That Rid Galaxies Of Matter

Nahum Arav from the American Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and his colleagues recently discovered to most powerful energy winds we ever observed with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. No other phenomena we know carries more mechanical energy. Over the duration of the quasar – which can go to up to 10 million years – these galactic winds can produce a million times more energy than a full-blown gamma-ray burst. And gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic single-time events we know of. But a quasar tsunami carries so much energy that they are hundreds of times more luminous than our own galaxy.

Whenever such a quasar tsunami passes through the galactic disk of its galaxy it washes out material that the galaxy needs to create new stars. The radiation coming from the quasar can carry the material much further than we expected and it seems that the quasar can completely clean out its host galaxy. When the quasar tsunami hits interstellar material its temperature gets to billions of degrees. The gas and dust shines in almost every part of the electromagnetic spectrum but especially in the gamma and x-ray part of the spectrum.

Hubble For The Win

Galaxy evolution simulations seem to indicate that quasar tsunamis could be the explanation of some of the current cosmological mysteries. For example, we aren't sure where there arent more large galaxies in the Universe. And we also aren't sure why is there a relation between the mass of a galaxy and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Quasar tsunamis might be the explanation again. There is a good chance that they were very common in the early Universe.

The researchers studied the tsunami energy of 13 quasars. To get their speed of these galactic winds they analyzed data from the Hubble Space Telescope. This is because only Hubble is sensitive enough in the UV part of the spectrum to get enough data for the research of quasar tsunamis. This allowed them to not only observe the most energetic quasar engines but also the fastest acceleration from 69.2 million kph to 74 million kph. And it is only going to get faster.

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I wonder if in the process of these tsunamis and the blasting away of galactic material they dont in turn snuff out the quasars. Which may "reignite" again at a latter date with a new infusion of material from things like collisions with other galaxies ot dwarf galaxies.

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