AN EXPERT from Southampton is part of a team who have made a major breakthrough in the study of black holes.

Professor Phil Charles from the University of Southampton was among the astrophysicists to detect an "intense" wind coming from one of the closest black holes to the Earth.

They studied the V404 Cygni black hole after it erupted back into activity last year, using the 10.4m Gran Telescopico Canarias telescope in the Canary Islands.

And their findings have revealed the presence of a wind of unionised hydrogen and helium formed in its outer layers which have a very high velocity of 3,000km a second - so high they could escape the black hole's gravitational field.

Professor Charles, from the physics and astronomy department at the University of Southampton, said: “Its presence allows us to explain why the outburst, in spite of being bright and very violent, with continuous changes in luminosity and ejections of mass in the form of jets, was also very brief, lasting only two weeks.”

Teo Muñoz Darias, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the lead author of the study (and also a former Marie Curie Fellow at Southampton), said: “The brightness of the source and the large collecting area of the GTC allowed us not only to detect the wind, but also to measure the variation of its properties on time-scales of minutes.

"The database obtained is probably the best ever observed for an object of this kind.

“This outburst of V404 Cygni, because of its complexity and because of the high quantity and quality of the observations, will help us understand how black holes swallow material via their accretion discs.”

It is believed the phenomena observed at V404 Cygni occur in other black holes with large accretion discs.

V404 Cygni is one of the closest black holes to Earth, at only 8,000 light years away, and had been quiescent for more than 25 years before last year's burst of activity.