Astronomers have detected the most distant ultra-fast outflow — a powerful wind of ionized gas moving at near-light speed — ever recorded, coming from a quasar located almost 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery, led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, provides an unprecedented look at the violent interplay between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies during a crucial era of cosmic history.

The outflow was found in the quasar WISSH13, an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus that consumes about 140 solar masses of gas and matter each year, exceeding even its theoretical maximum accretion limit known as the Eddington limit. Using data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite — through the ambitious Heritage WISSHFUL observing program, which logged roughly 600 hours of observation — along with nearly 700 hours of simultaneous observations from NASA's NuSTAR telescope, the research team obtained the highest-quality broadband X-ray spectrum ever captured for such a distant object without the aid of gravitational lensing.

What makes this discovery particularly remarkable is that the spectrum of WISSH13 reveals not one but two distinct ultra-fast outflows, each with a different velocity and showing marked temporal variability. One component races outward at about 30 percent of the speed of light, while the other moves at roughly 10 percent of light speed. Both are among the most powerful outflows ever detected, with each capable of ejecting material at a rate of about 20 solar masses per year. «Imagine a hurricane triggered by a black hole billions of light-years away, so devastating that it sweeps away cosmic clouds and prevents its galaxy from forming new stars,» said Giorgio Lanzuisi, INAF researcher and principal investigator of the WISSHFUL program. «With this study, we have taken an X-ray of one of these giant hurricanes — gas racing at up to 90,000 kilometers per second — catching it in the most turbulent period of the universe's adolescence. Understanding how these storms work is essential to explaining why the cosmos looks and behaves the way we see it today.»

The study also sheds light on the complex structure of these outflows. The faster wind appears to be more variable and likely linked to magnetic fields near the black hole, while the slower, more stable component is thought to be driven by radiation pressure. «The gas that makes up these winds is very hot and highly ionized, yet it does not shine — it behaves like a ghost,» explained Laura Borrelli, a PhD student at the University of Bologna and co-author of the paper. «Its presence is only noticeable because it absorbs some of the X-ray radiation emitted by the black hole behind it. To find them, we conducted blind searches of the spectra. Comparing 2024 data with an archive observation from 2017, we realized that the slow wind was always there waiting for us, while the one at 0.3c was entirely new. In short, black holes are not static systems; they have their own weather, made of transient storms.»

The detection of these ultra-fast outflows is part of the WISSHFUL program, which focuses on the brightest quasars from the early universe during the so-called Cosmic Noon — a period roughly 10 to 12 billion years ago, between 2 and 4 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was forming stars and growing black holes at the highest rate in its history. The scientific context is the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies: energy released by black hole activity can sweep away cold gas, suppressing star formation and further black hole growth in a process known as active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. Studying this feedback at Cosmic Noon is crucial for understanding the mechanisms that shaped galaxies, including the Milky Way.

In addition to the outflows, the researchers measured the temperature of the black hole's corona — the region of hot plasma around the black hole that produces X-rays. It turned out to be among the lowest ever recorded for a supermassive black hole, a characteristic potentially linked to the extremely high accretion rate and the presence of powerful winds. This finding adds another piece to the puzzle of how black holes and their environments interact under extreme conditions, offering a clearer picture of the turbulent adolescent universe and its lasting impact on the cosmos we see today.