ScienceScienceDailyBlack holes of every size follow the same surprising rule
Scientists have discovered that black holes of wildly different sizes all launch powerful jets at the same critical point in their feeding cycle.
Scientists have found evidence that black holes of vastly different sizes may launch powerful jets according to the same universal rule. Supermassive black holes can produce jets soon after tearing apart a star, then fire up again hundreds or thousands of days later when their feeding rate drops to about 2% of the Eddington limit. That same threshold is known to trigger jets from much smaller black holes in the Milky Way.
A study published in Nature Astronomy found that black holes follow a universal rule for launching jets, regardless of whether they are stellar-mass or supermassive.
Researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study and Curtin University combined telescope data from America, Australia, India, South Africa and space to reach their findings.
The discovery was made possible by studying tidal disruption events, where a star is torn apart by a black hole, giving scientists a rare real-time window into black hole behaviour.
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