While previous researchers have hypothesized that black holes eat slowly, new simulations indicate that black holes scarf food much faster than conventional understanding suggests. Some quasars brighten and disappear within months -- a time scale that aligns with the new findings.
A new Northwestern University-led study is changing the way astrophysicists understand the eating habits of supermassive black holes.
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. Previous researchers have mistakenly assumed that accretion disks are relatively orderly. In these models, gas and particles swirl around the black hole -- in the same plane as the black hole and in the same direction of the black hole's spin. Then, over a time scale of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years, gas particles gradually spiral into the black hole to feed it.
Frame-dragging makes the entire disk wobble in circles, similar to how a gyroscope precesses. But the inner disk wants to wobble much more rapidly than the outer parts. This mismatch of forces causes the entire disk to warp, causing gas from different parts of the disk to collide. The collisions create bright shocks that violently drive material closer and closer to the black hole.
"There is competition between the rotation of the black hole and the friction and pressure inside the disk," Kaaz said."The tearing region is where the black hole wins. The inner and outer disks collide into each other. The outer disk shaves off layers of the inner disk, pushing it inwards." "The inner region of an accretion disk, where most of the brightness comes from, can totally disappear -- really quickly over months," Kaaz said."We basically see it go away entirely. The system stops being bright. Then, it brightens again and the process repeats. Conventional theory doesn't have any way to explain why it disappears in the first place, and it doesn't explain how it refills so quickly.
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