This supermassive black hole flung out matter at 134 million mph: 'On a scale almost too big to imagine'

Supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, but the behemoth at the heart of spiral galaxy NGC 3783 really takes the cake — and then flings it out into space at a fifth the speed of light.

Astronomers recently spotted a gale of hot, charged particles erupting from this black hole in the aftermath of a powerful X-ray flare that occurred just a few hours earlier. As one of the study's co-authors, Matteo Guainazzi,described it in a statement, picture a cosmic storm "similar to the flares that erupt from the sun, but on a scale almost too big to imagine." Guainazzi is a project scientist on the European Space Agency's XRISM X-ray telescope, which led to these results.

And the breathtaking sight could help astrophysicists better understand how supermassive black holes shape the fat