• Quasar winds with record energy levels were seen fleeing a distant galaxy (ScienceNews)
• Focus on HST/COS Observations of Quasar Outflows in the 500–1050 Å Rest Frame (IOPScience)

In general, the universe doesn’t really do normal. Every galaxy seems to be finding it’s own way to be the biggest or smallest or flattest or roundest. If there is an adjective to be had, there is probably a galaxy to be the most or least of that descriptor, at least in the eyes of some astronomer.

In today’s first story, we look at the galaxy SDSS J1042+1646. This system was spectroscopically observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. This means that the precise motions of different kinds of gases could be measured, allowing the velocity of the galaxy itself to be compared to the velocities of material streaming away. SDSS J1042+1646 is an active galaxy, with a feeding black hole that has an associated accretion disk that glows so brightly that we call this system a quasar. In looking at the materials flowing out of this system’s jets, astronomers could calculate that  5 million trillion trillion gigawatts of energy were escaping. This is 100 times less energy than the stars in the Milky Way produce! What’s particularly cool, is this system has been under observation for a number of years, and while the material was seen flowing at 1,550 km/s in 2011, new observations in 2017 showed the gas moving at 21,050 km/s! This is an 8% increase. This energy is associated with the increased energy of the accretion disk, and this is exactly the kind of energy that we’ve talked about before when discussing how galaxies essentially turn off, by blasting everything around there core away. This disk is giving off so much energy that it is triggering star formation, and whatever material doesn’t form stars is simply getting pushed away. When the current epoch of activity – both the active feeding of the black hole and the associated star formation – this system is going to take a long siesta. Star formation will be effectively over and the black hole will starve unless it is someday reawakened through a collision with another galaxy.

While we’d theorized systems like this, it’s amazing to see them caught in the act of energetically killing everything around them. And it wasn’t just this one galaxy. The system was discussed in 1 of 6 papers published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement series on March 16 (second link above). These papers document a myriad of additional, less energetic but still fascinating systems.