At the center of most large galaxies is a supermassive black hole. Yep, even the Milky Way has one — although it’s currently dormant.
However, we’ve spotted active, hungry black holes in distant galaxies, like Centaurus A, which is 12 million light years away.
A new simulation, published August 17 in The Astrophysical Journal, gives insight into how galaxies feed energy into their hungry centers.
Past models of black holes show how rapidly the objects grow, and how some become quasars — rapidly-growing supermassive black holes that shoot out jets of light and energy.
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In the simulation, they accounted for the effects that stellar winds, radiation, feedback from supernovae, the rate of universe expansion, and other cosmic forces would have on black hole energy consumption.
“Other models can tell you a lot of details about what’s happening very close to the black hole, but they don’t contain information about what the rest of the galaxy is doing or even less about what the environment around the galaxy is doing.”
Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, lead study author and professor of physics at University of Connecticut
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Putting on the brakes, as study author Claude-André Faucher-Giguère puts it, helps that energy fall into the center of the black hole.