An international team of astronomers has discovered a completely new way to probe the behavior of active black holes while eating.
At the centers of 136 galaxies, samples of active black holes were found to glow in the same way under microwaves and X-rays, regardless of their appetite for material from surrounding galaxies, such as dust and gaseous clouds of plasma.
Led by scientists from Cardiff University, the team said the process is not what we currently understand how black holes feed.
Currently understood to be fundamentally different according to their appetites, active black holes are characterized by the layout of their cores and the way they are mapped in the Milky Way matter.
However, the team found that these black holes may have more similarities than previously thought.
Their findings, which will soon be published in the Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society, could provide new information about how galaxies evolve.
Dr Ilaria Ruffa, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "The microwave and X-ray glows we detect from the regions around these black holes appear to be directly correlated with their mass and originate from the plasma flow into which disorder falls.
This is the case with both systems, which have huge appetites and eat almost the entire star every year, just like our sun, while those with smaller appetites eat the same amount of matter in 100,000 years.
This is very surprising because we previously thought that this flow should only occur in systems where the low rate of eating is made, whereas in those systems with huge appetites, the black hole should pass through a more orderly and constant flow of matter (commonly called'Acquation disc') to feed.
The team made the discovery while studying the connection between the cold gases around active black holes and how they are fueled in Wisdom samples from 35 nearby galaxies captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.
Dr. Ruffa added: "Our study shows that the microwave light we detected may actually come from these plasma streams in all types of active black holes, changing the way we think about how these systems consume matter and grow into the cosmic monsters we see today."
The correlations observed by the team also provide a new way to estimate the mass of black holes, which astronomers believe is central to understanding their impact on the evolution of galaxies in the universe.
Co-author Dr Timothy Davis, a reader in Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, added: "Galaxies are very concerned about the black holes that exist in their core. They probably shouldn't, because while we always think of black holes as these supermassive beasts that devour everything around them, they are really very small and light in the context of the entire galaxy.
However, they have a mysterious non-gravitational effect on matter tens of thousands of light-years away from them. This is something we've been baffling for years as astronomers.
Measuring the mass of black holes and how they compare to the properties of the host galaxy is the best way to begin to understand why this mystery persists. Our new approach opens a new window into this problem, and the next generation of instruments will allow us to explore it in depth in cosmic time.
Their "Elementary Plane of Black Hole Accretion at Millimeter Wavelengths" will be published in the Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, and the results are currently available on the ARXIV preprint server.
More information:Ilaria Ruffa et al., Elementary Plane of Black Hole Accretion at Millimeter Wavelengths, Arxiv (2023). doi： 10.48550/arxiv.2307.13872