
Black hole creating cosmic hurricane
Astronomers have discovered some of the fastest winds ever detecter coming from a black hole near the centre of our galaxy.
The record-breaking winds were clocked at more that 32 million kilometres per hour or three per cent of the speed of linght.
The finding help scientists better understad these giant gravity wells, where light cannot escape and the laws of physics breakdown.
Stellar-mass black holes are created by the supernova death of a star five to ten times the mass of the sun.
Astronomers from the university of Michigan were studying a stellar mass black hole called IGR J17091-3624 when they made the stellar wind discovery.
The black hole is in a binary system in the middle of the Milky Way, 28.000 linght-years from Earth.
The reseachers detected gas being blown off the black hole's accretion disk.
The disk is a superheated soup of debris ans plasma where matter is crushed, stretched and torn apart.
Using spectroscopic reading of iron atoms emanating from the disk, King and colleagues clocked wind speeds matching some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times larger.
"This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five hurricane,