Big and little black holes feed the same way

What they found: The study in the Astrophysical Journal suggests all black holes go through a similar cycle when feeding whether they are about 10 times the mass of our Sun or a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

• Scientists know that when relatively small black holes get a large helping of gas or dust, they move into a phase where the object feeds from a disc surrounding the black hole — called an accretion disk.
• As the disc collapses, the area around the black hole can glow brightly in X-ray, and that eventually gives way to the object becoming quiet again. This all happens over the course of a few weeks to months.
• Researchers thought this process would take too long for them to watch the whole thing play out with a supermassive black hole, but the new study found feeding can speed up if the black hole gets a large meal all at once, like when it shreds a star.

How they did it: The researchers behind the new study watched as a supermassive black hole 860 million light-years away gobbled up a star in 2018, giving them a firsthand view of how these huge black holes eat.

The bottom line: “When you throw a ball of gas at them, they all seem to do more or less the same thing," study author Dheeraj Pasham, of MIT, said in a statement. "They’re the same beast in terms of their accretion."

• "We’ve demonstrated that if you’ve seen one black hole, you’ve seen them all, in a sense."