Astronomers detected a powerful cosmic 'UFO'. It’s not what you think: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Somewhere out in the universe, there's a quasar so distant that its light has been traveling toward us for nearly 12 billion years. We're talking about WISSH13—a quasar from back when the universe was a cosmic toddler, just 2 billion years old. And it's been blowing its top.

A team of astronomers, led by Giorgio Lanzuisi of INAF Bologna, just caught this quasar in the act of launching one of the most powerful winds ever recorded. Scientists call it a UFO—no, not that kind. UFO here stands for "ultra-fast outflow." Think less little green men, more raging cosmic windstorm.

But how do you catch a wind you can't even see?

Loading embed...

The astronomers explain in a paper undergoing peer-review revisions at Astronomy & Astrophysics how they pointed two X-ray telescopes—XMM-Newton and NuSTAR—at WISSH13 at the same time. Two telescopes, two perspectives, one super-detailed picture. Kind of like wearing 3D glasses, but for X-rays.

Picture the quasar's X-ray light like a smooth, glowing rainbow. But where there's gas (like iron atoms) floating between us and the quasar, that gas gobbles up very specific colors of light, just like a colored filter on a camera lens. And here's the kicker: iron always eats the exact same ‘color’ of light... unless that gas is moving.

If the gas is rushing toward us, that so-called “absorption dip” gets shoved to a different spot—a shift scientists call "blueshift." If it sounds familiar, that’s because it follows the same principle as a siren that sounds different as an ambulance speeds toward you.

27 Tatooines: Astronomers Spot New Worlds With Double Suns in Our Own Galaxy

Luke Skywalker’s home planet may be fictional, but Earth's scientists recently identified several planets in the Milky Way galaxy with Tatooine-like sunsets.

These dips were dramatically shifted. The astronomers calculated that one stream of gas was screaming toward us at 10 percent of the speed of light—and a second stream was absolutely tearing through space at 30 percent of the speed of light. That's nearly 200 million miles per hour.

When the team checked older data from 2017, they found the slower wind had been blowing for years, but that blistering-fast wind? Brand new to the scene in 2024. Looks like the fastest winds might also be the shortest-lived.

Too fast, too furious, if you will.

Alien Space Weather Stations Orbiting Distant Stars Could Tell Us Where Life Exists

Massive plasma rings around young M dwarf stars are giving astronomers their first real look at the invisible particle storms shaping exoplanet habitability.

Each of these streams is blasting out material equal to more than 20 of our suns every single year. That's not a breeze, folks—that's a full-blown cosmic gale, and it’s the most distant ultra-fast wind ever detected from a quasar that wasn’t getting a magnifying boost from gravitational lensing. All from raw signal, billions of light-years away.

Even though this UFO is one of the most powerful ever observed, it behaves just like wimpier winds we see in galaxies much closer to home. So the physics hasn't changed. The mystery has just gotten older.

Twelve billion years, and black hole toddlers still throw the same tantrum. WISSH13 just happens to be the loudest one we've heard.

Humanity Just Found the Milky Way’s Edge And Earth’s Closer Than We Thought

By tracking ancient giant stars, astronomers have traced a fuzzy, long‑hidden boundary where the Milky Way’s star‑forming disc ends that is only tens of thousands of light‑years beyond our own Sun.