Black Holes Prepare Their Own Meals: Study

Black holes aren’t just gorging themselves on whatever cosmic material is readily available—they’re preparing those meals for themselves. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals that black holes are capable of cooling hot gas to an “edible” temperature. This suggests that, rather than using their gravitational pull to passively feed on anything that tips over the event horizon, black holes play a fairly active role in their own mealtimes.

Published Monday in Nature Astronomy and shared via NASA’s blog, the study looked at seven galaxy clusters, each with its own central black hole. An international team of astronomers plugged Chandra’s X-ray observations of each cluster into a novel imaging decomposition method called the General Morphological Component Analysis (GMCA), which extracts the spatial and spectral information from X-ray data. By pairing those findings with 3D views of the universe generated by the Very Large Telescope’s (VLT) Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument, the team spotted filaments of both hot and warm gas.

These filaments support a pre-existing theory regarding black holes’ ability to “cook” for themselves. Scientists know that a black hole’s intense gravitational pull creates an accretion disk, or a swirling mass of gas, dust, plasma, and other particles that are eventually swallowed by the black hole’s gaping maw. Sometimes, as a black hole feasts, it channels some of its meal to its poles, where the hot material is ejected in the form of an astrophysical jet. 

The gaseous filaments illuminated by Chandra and the VLT show that these jets strike hot gas in the black hole’s celestial neighborhood, producing a cavity that fills with cooler gas. Because that gas is now close to the hungry black hole, it’s pulled into the black hole’s accretion disk, which funnels the gas toward the hole itself. Essentially, the cool gas becomes the next course in the black hole’s meal.

NASA notes that these findings won’t just build upon researchers’ understanding of black holes’ gluttonous habits—they’ll also help astronomers understand how new stars form. Stellar nurseries are thought to take shape when filaments of cool gas condense, creating the beginnings of a new star. By continuing to study the darkest thing in the universe, researchers might accidentally uncover the secrets behind what brings light to the sky.