Astronomers Spot Powerful ‘UFO’ Blasting From a Distant Black Hole

The headline sounds like science fiction, but the “UFO” here has nothing to do with aliens. In astronomy, it means an ultra-fast outflow: a violent wind of gas launched from the region around a feeding supermassive black hole.

Astronomers studying a distant hyper-luminous quasar called WISSH13 have detected one of the most powerful examples ever seen. The system is so far away that researchers are looking at it as it was roughly 2 billion years after the Big Bang, during a peak era of black hole and galaxy growth.