Monster black hole spewing out particles at a million miles per hour

A monstrous black hole lurking at the heart of a galaxy millions of light years from Earth may help unlock long standing mystery about how galaxies grow and maybe even how our own may meet its demise, a new discovery suggests.

Using the powerful telescopes of the European Southern Observatory located in the high mountain desert in Chile, an international team of astronomers have spied a galaxy, dubbed IC5063 with a supermassive black hole at its core that is actively shooting out an impressive gas jet into space. The researchers of the new study published this week in the journal Nature were able to examine the properties of the blast and even clock its speed - which appears to be a ridiculous million kilometers an hour.

Black holes are some of the most bizarre objects in the universe that have such strong gravitational fields that even light cannot escape. The supermassive variety found at the core of most galaxies can have a maw as wide as our solar system and weigh billions of times the mass of our Sun.

While the speedy outflow of particles at the centre of galaxies is nothing new to science, until now no one really knew how they were being accelerated to such incredible speeds. Astronomers can now reveal that energetic jets of electrons powered by the black hole actually propel the gases.

The cosmic outflows of radiation and gas belched out by these actively feeding galactic predators are the result of material falling in and getting superheated as it nears the black hole. It is all this gas, traveling at near the speed of light, that is believed to be the key ingredient in the evolution of most galaxies we see today, including our own.

So while these black holes are notorious for ripping apart and swallowing entire stars, the material they spew out can pepper the cosmos – much like a sprinkler system – with the building blocks of stars, planets and maybe even life.

But the news is not all that good for the galaxy itself. Because by blasting all this gas and dust far out into deep space, the black hole is in effect starving its host galaxy from being able to form new generations of stars.

Our own Milky Way also has a quiet supermassive black hole at its core – slowly slurping up hapless stars and gas that may wander too close. Could it one day suck the life out of our own galaxy?

Astronomers believe these new findings may very well help us understand our own eventual fate. Current theories hold that our Milky Way will collide with our next door big brother Andromeda galaxy, which currently sits some 2.6 million light years from us.

When this smash-up occurs, copious amounts of gas will gravitationally be drawn to the centre of the newly formed franken-galaxy. And just like what we are seeing in IC 5063, all this material will be shot out from the resulting black hole – removing the essential fuel needed to form new stars and shutting down the Milky Way's growth.

But experts say there is no need to fret because we have time before all this cosmic mayhem occurs some 5 billion years from now.