{"id":897584,"date":"2026-09-19T09:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T09:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/897584\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T09:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T09:42:10","slug":"scientists-find-a-universal-rule-for-black-hole-jets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/897584\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Find a Universal Rule for Black Hole Jets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black holes of all sizes seem to follow the same playbook: when matter falls in, jets blast out. For stellar black holes<\/a>, we can watch this happen quickly. For supermassive ones, changes take centuries, but rare tidal disruption events let us see the drama unfold in just a few years.<\/p>\n

Over the past several decades, astrophysicists have been stuck on an unsolvable cosmic-scale wonder: how black holes can erupt with extremely powerful jets<\/a>. These jets are not some vague, intangible cosmic rays; they are substantial streams of matter, and every particle within them is accelerated to nearly the speed of light, moving at an unimaginably fast pace. But why do some black holes fire jets immediately after feeding, while others wait months or years before erupting?<\/p>\n

An international team co-led by Andrew Mummery of the Institute for Advanced Study and Adelle Goodwin of Curtin University has uncovered a universal rule. Their study, published in Nature Astronomy, shows that black holes of all sizes, whether stellar-mass objects ten times the Sun\u2019s weight or supermassive giants millions of times heavier, launch jets at the same critical point in their feeding cycle.<\/p>\n

Mummery stated, \u201cWe really wanted to figure out this massive puzzle. Why do some supermassive black holes blast out radio jets right after shredding a star, while others just sit there looking completely dormant, only to fire up their jets months or even years later suddenly?\u201d<\/p>\n

The secrets to burping black hole revealed<\/a><\/p>\n

Often described as cosmic vacuum cleaners, black holes are more like messy eaters<\/a>: everything that comes near them gets sucked in, leaving not a single trace behind. When they encounter a passing star<\/a>, they first tear it apart, then slowly swallow it.<\/p>\n

Most of the star\u2019s material ends up in the black hole, but a large amount is violently expelled, creating streams of matter that move outward. These cosmic \u2018burps\u2019 can send matter<\/a> thousands of light-years away and may even affect the fates of entire galaxies.<\/p>\n

The team monitored tidal disruption events (TDEs), rare instances in which supermassive black holes tear apart stars. Unlike the slow evolution of black holes over millennia, TDEs compress the feeding process into just a few years, offering a unique observational window.<\/p>\n

The team studied 20 tidal disruption events, using the full range of observational wavelengths: optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, and radio. By combining observations across wavelengths, they determined that the onset of black hole jets follows two distinct temporal patterns.<\/p>\n

The first phase is early, in which the jet appears as soon as the black hole begins to accrete matter at an extremely high rate, while the other phase is delayed. In this case, the jet does not form until hundreds or even thousands of days have passed, by which time the black hole\u2019s accretion rate has dropped to about 2 percent of the Eddington limit.<\/p>\n

The same 2 percent figure is the threshold that leads to the formation of jets in small black holes in the Milky Way<\/a>. This new finding proves that this basic physical law is universal and can be applied no matter the size of the black hole.<\/p>\n

The breakthrough happened at a bar in Madrid during an astrophysics conference, where Mummery and Goodwin immediately thought the rules governing jet formation in small black holes might also apply to these distant supermassive black holes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After cross-checking data, they found that the activity patterns of the two types of black holes aligned perfectly. They then spent several months carefully analyzing the collected data and ultimately confirmed the conjecture.<\/p>\n

This discovery not only solves a long-standing cosmic mystery, but also creates tangible opportunities for future research. Now that we know when delayed jets are most likely to appear, astronomers can book observation facilities more efficiently, even those with extremely high demand and fully booked schedules, such as the soon-to-be-completed Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope.<\/p>\n

As Mummery put it: \u201cWe hope that our work will pave the way for even more profound discoveries about our universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journal Reference:<\/p>\n

Goodwin, A.J., Mummery, A. A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet formation. Nat Astron (2026). DOI: 10.1038\/s41550-026-02951-1<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Black holes of all sizes seem to follow the same playbook: when matter falls in, jets blast out.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":897585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,10562,1986,128,20374],"class_list":["post-897584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-black-hole","tag-matter","tag-science","tag-universe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/897585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}