Supermassive black hole “burps” reveal the size of cosmic monsters

When you think of black holes, you probably don’t tend to wonder if they’re hungry. The idea of ​​a greedy feeding black hole is pretty daunting, I bet. Rest easy, though, because a black hole’s eating habits can help us understand them better.

A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published Thursday in the journal Science found that feeding supermassive black holes emit a noticeable flickering light, the pattern of which is directly related to their mass.

When dormant, supermassive black holes are usually quite dull and don’t emit much light. When active and feeding, however, they produce a flickering pattern of light that we can detect across the universe, ranging from hours to decades.

“Many studies have explored the possible relationships between the observed flicker and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial,” said Colin Burke, graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the study.

The team, led by Burke, analyzed the patterns of variability to identify a characteristic timescale, allowing them to equate the flicker patterns to the mass of a supermassive black hole. When it comes to these active and nourishing supermassive black holes, shorter flicker timescales indicate a smaller black hole, while longer timescales indicate more massive black holes.

Researchers describe the flicker as the black hole equivalent of a burp. When we are infants, we usually burp a lot more. However, adults are able to hold back the burp longer (unless you are the “better off than” type).

It is the burping that might help us come to terms with the relative sizes of not only supermassive black holes, but also white dwarfs and, hopefully, intermediate mass black holes, or IMBHs, that are believed to have formed throughout the process. history of the universe but are rare and hard to find.

“Now that there is a correlation between the flicker pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what an IMBH’s flicker signal might look like,” said Burke.