Researchers using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have been able to use X-ray spectra from a quasar to determine how black holes and their host galaxies evolve over time.

The team studied the quasar PDS 456 and found a stream of highly ionized gas pouring out of it at incredible speeds.

A quasar, or quasi-stellar-object is a black hole in the process of feeding. When material gets close enough to be consumed by the black hole it forms an accretion disk around the black hole. The intense gravity heats the material up to a temperature of many millions of degrees and blasts out a tremendous jet of radiation. This material can be seen for many million of light years.

PDS 456, discovered in the 1980s, is a bright quasar 2 billion light years from Earth in the south-western part of the constellation Serpens Cauda and close to the constellation Ophiuchus.

The discovery of the stream allowed astronomers to measure the strength of the black hole winds for the first time and show their potential impact on their host galaxies.

As objects fall into the black hole during the quasar phase, matter is released in the form of ration-driven winds which transfer matter into the host galaxy.

“We know that black holes in the centers of galaxies can feed on matter, and this process can produce winds. This is thought to regulate the growth of the galaxies. Knowing the speed, shape and size of the winds, we can figure out how powerful they are,” said Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in a statement.

Harrison is the principal investigator of NuSTAR and a co-author on a new paper about the results which appears in the February 19 issue of the journal Science.

Harrison and her team found that the X-ray-emitting winds travel at up to one-third the speed of light, or about 62,000 miles per second. Additionally the amount of energy emitting from the quasar is the equivalent of what is emitted by 1 trillion suns.

That, according to the researchers, is enough to have a considerable impact on the host galaxy and enough to make new stars.

“By looking at this huge spherical outflow, we can now see a mechanism to explain the correlation between black hole and galaxy formation,” said Bill Craig of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Space Science Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley.

NuStar and the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM-Newton simultaneously observed PDS 456 on five separate occasions in 2013 and 2014. The goal was to look for iron and other matter from the black hole. The telescopes complement each other by being able to observe different parts of the x-ray spectrum. The combined data from the two telescopes provided researchers with the data they needed to prove that the winds emirate in a spherical fashion and not a beam.

With the shape of the winds determine, the research could determine their power and ability to form new stars.

The research is especially interesting in light of another study which shows a relationship between the size of black holes and the mass of the dark matter halo around elliptical galaxies.

It begins to paint a picture of black holes shaped by the mass of dark matter halos and galaxies shaped, at least in part, by the black holes at their core.