Last night, I re-watched an episode of the PBS series called Nova, on black hole detection (originally aired in 2018). . . and as luck would have it, the European Space Agency has a great new bit of interstellar science — about the so-called super-massives [weighing in at over 70 million times the mass of our Sun!], and their ability to generate vast jets, travelling at one-fifth the speed of light.

This discovery was made by XRISM’s Resolve instrument — and indicates that such blasts can form in under a few hours, and dissipate, just as rapidly.

[Of course, since the vast x-ray emissions from it are just reaching us today, this cataclysmic event occurred about 130 million years ago — not more than eye-blink though, on the cosmic time-scales.] Here’s the latest from ESA — on all that:

…Leading X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and XRISM have spotted an extraordinary blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60,000 km per second.

The gigantic black hole lurks within NGC 3783, a beautiful spiral galaxy imaged recently by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers spotted a bright X-ray flare erupt from the black hole before swiftly fading away. As it faded, fast winds emerged, raging at one-fifth of the speed of light….

“We’ve not watched a black hole create winds this speedily before,” says lead researcher Liyi Gu at Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON). “For the first time, we’ve seen how a rapid burst of X-ray light from a black hole immediately triggers ultra-fast winds, with these winds forming in just a single day….”

Now you know… what an infinitesimal, fragile, and ethereal beauty our sparkling blue life-raft is… in all of this, right? Amazing!

Do take good care of one another, as it may turn out that this and now, is all we will ever be, or have. I seriously doubt we are unique in all the Universe, but a single blast like this would wipe out potentially hundreds of millions of civilizations (were they out there — anywhere near NGC 3783, some 130 million years ago). We are so very… lucky, indeed.

नमस्ते