This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intalyata.

Got a minute?

Black holes are not all created equal.

There are the regular star-sized ones,

and then the supermassive black holes,

which really live up to their name.

So the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole

sitting at the center, weighing upwards of 4 million times the mass of the sun.

They're monsters.

Jesse Rogerson, an astrophysicist at York University in Toronto.

Rogerson studies the sites of the most violent, most active, supermassive black holes, quasars.

They are pretty much some of the most extreme things you'll find in the universe.

The black holes at the centers of quasars gobble up massive amounts of gas and dust.

And that heat, that radiation that's created from the falling in,

it actually turns itself into a disk of stuff falling in.

So it's kind of like circling the drain almost and

that accretion disk that's that disk of stuff is so bright it can outshine the

entire galaxy within which it resides. That disk isn't just bright, it's also blazing hot, and that intense heat creates winds.

Think of a massive hair dryer, like the size of our solar system, blowing away galactic gas and debris.

Robertson and his colleagues aimed the Gemini Observatory on one such quasar, called

J.O.230, about 11 billion light years away.

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