Powerful Black-Hole Wind Ruffles Spiral Galaxy

A huge, windy swirl of gas — usually found in the largest, most active galaxies — commands the center of a spiral similar to the Milky Way and may disrupt the galaxy's star formation process, new research shows. The galaxy, spotted by the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton satellite telescope observatory, is, like the Milky Way, a spiral with a supermassive black hole at the center. The gases and winds swirl around the black hole at about 10 percent of the speed of light, the s