Black Holes Flicker as They Stop Gorging Themselves on Matter

Black holes are by nature difficult to study directly. Because even light cannot escape these massive objects, astronomers must turn to other methods to spot and study them. While information is lost once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, outside that boundary, it can still escape. A recent study, led by a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy of the Universidad de Chile, has now found that the amount of light emitted from around a black hole is determined by one thing, and one thing only: the rate at which matter is falling into the black hole. The research, published September 4 in the Astrophysical Journal, was aimed at determining the physical mechanism behind the variability observed from the active black holes at the centers of galaxies (known as active galactic nuclei, or AGN), which are supermassive black holes currently sucking in matter. In astronomy, this process is ...