Scientists solve when black holes 'burp' — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Adelle Goodwin and Andrew Mummery published findings in Nature Astronomy identifying two distinct phases when supermassive black holes fire jets after consuming stars: during peak feeding and hundreds to thousands of days later when feeding drops to about 2% of maximum rate.
- The team analyzed 20 tidal disruption events using radio telescopes, the only frequency where jets and outflows can be tracked in motion, Goodwin said.
- The 2% feeding threshold triggering jets matches what's already known about stellar-mass black holes (10–50 times the sun's mass), suggesting black holes release jets at the same point in their feeding cycle regardless of size.
- Only about half of a star that gets too close to a black hole is actually swallowed, with the rest blasted back into space as jets so powerful they "can influence the entire evolution of a galaxy," per Goodwin.
- The finding will let astrophysicists precisely predict jet timing, narrowing observation windows and freeing up "precious telescope time," Goodwin said.
- Sara Webb of Swinburne University, who was not involved, said the study shows supermassive black holes "behave rather predictably at two distant periods in their evolution" — tying behavior across vastly different black hole scales.
Why it matters: Goodwin said the discovery lets scientists "really start to understand not just when the jets are launched, but also how strong they are and if that is then dependent on the black hole properties." For an astrophysics community that has watched jets fire anywhere from one to five years after a star is destroyed with no way to predict timing, a universal 2% feeding threshold cuts wasted telescope time and unifies behavior across black holes spanning orders of magnitude in mass.
Ask SkimNews
