“But some quasars - which result from black holes eating gas from their accretion disks - appear to drastically change over time scales of months to years. “Classical accretion disk theory predicts that the disk evolves slowly,” said Northwestern’s Nick Kaaz, who led the study. This new finding could help explain the dramatic behavior of some of the brightest objects in the night sky, including quasars, which abruptly flare up and then vanish without explanation. One cycle of the endlessly repeating eat-refill-eat process takes mere months - a shockingly fast timescale compared to the hundreds of years that researchers previously proposed. Then, debris from the outer subdisk spills inward to refill the gap left behind by the wholly consumed inner ring, and the eating process repeats. This results in the disk tearing into inner and outer subdisks. 20) in The Astrophysical Journal.Īccording to new high-resolution 3D simulations, spinning black holes twist up the surrounding space-time, ultimately ripping apart the violent whirlpool of gas (or accretion disk) that encircles and feeds them. While previous researchers have hypothesized that black holes eat slowly, new simulations indicate that black holes scarf food much faster than conventional understanding suggests. A new Northwestern University-led study is changing the way astrophysicists understand the eating habits of supermassive black holes. Some quasars, which are extremely luminous objects caused by black holes eating gas, brighten and disappear within months - a time scale that aligns with the new findingsĮVANSTON, Ill.In new simulations, the eating process takes mere months.Conventional theory says supermassive black holes, which lurk at the centers of galaxies, eat over time scales of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years.Using new high-resolution simulations, researchers discover completely new way that gas reaches a black hole to feed it.Journal: The Astrophysical Journal Published Paper
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