{"id":773575,"date":"2026-09-17T11:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/773575\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T11:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:56:09","slug":"very-messy-eaters-scientists-solve-the-mystery-of-when-black-holes-burp-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/773575\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Very messy eaters\u2019: scientists solve the mystery of when black holes \u2018burp\u2019 | Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists have solved the mystery of when black holes \u201cburp\u201d \u2013 when the astronomical bodies launch jets after feeding on stars, blasting material enormous distances in space.<\/p>\n

Black holes are objects so densely compact that beyond a certain point their gravity is too strong for light and matter to escape. This boundary of no return is known as the event horizon \u2013 the point at which escaping would require something to travel faster than the speed of light.<\/p>\n

Despite their reputation as cosmic sinkholes, black holes are \u201cactually very messy eaters\u201d, said Dr Adelle Goodwin, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Western Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to get really, really close to a black hole to get to the event horizon,\u201d Goodwin, also a Forrest Research Foundation fellow, said. \u201cStars get destroyed further out than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists know from rare observations of stars being torn apart by black holes \u2013 a process that involves a stretching effect known as \u201cspaghettification<\/a>\u201d \u2013 that \u201conly about half of the star that gets too close to the back hole will end up eventually being swallowed by that black hole\u201d, Goodwin said.<\/p>\n

The other material is launched back into space in powerful jets and outflows, sometimes so large they \u201ccan influence the entire evolution of a galaxy\u201d, she said. \u201cYou can think of it as a black hole burp.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the timing of these burps had previously been mysterious to astrophysicists. \u201cSometimes it would happen a year after the black hole destroyed the star, sometimes it would happen three or five years after.\u201d<\/p>\n

Illustration of a tidal disruption event. Research shows that black holes appear to release jets at the same point in their feeding cycle regardless of size. Illustration: Science Communication Lab<\/p>\n

In new research published in the journal Nature Astronomy<\/a>, Goodwin and co-author Dr Andrew Mummery from the Institute for Advanced Study believe they have found the answer, using radio telescopes to study 20 tidal disruption events \u2013 instances where stars are eaten by supermassive black holes.<\/p>\n

\u201cRadio is the only frequency where we can watch the jets and outflows as they\u2019re moving outwards,\u201d Goodwin said.<\/p>\n

They found that supermassive black holes \u2013 which range in size from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun \u2013 fire off powerful jets in two distinct phases in their feeding cycle.<\/p>\n

The first occurs when the black hole is feeding at very high rates. The second occurs hundreds to thousands of days after the star is first torn apart, when the feeding rate drops to about 2% of the maximum rate at which a black hole can swallow material.<\/p>\n

That same threshold is already known to trigger burps from stellar-mass black holes, much smaller bodies about 10 to 50 times the mass of our sun.<\/p>\n

The research showed that black holes appeared to release jets at the same point in their feeding cycle regardless of size, Goodwin said. She said the finding would enable scientists to precisely predict when such jets would be released, narrowing observation windows and freeing up precious telescope time.<\/p>\n

Dr Adelle Goodwin at the Square Kilometre Array Observatory in Western Australia. Photograph: Forrest Research Foundation<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cWe can really start to understand not just when the jets are launched, but also how strong they are and if that is then dependent on the black hole properties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University who was not involved in the research, said: \u201cWe are still trying to untangle the very fundamentals of the most extreme objects in the universe \u2013 supermassive black holes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Webb said the study showed \u201cthat supermassive black holes behave rather predictably at two distant periods in their evolution\u201d and the researchers had \u201ctie[d] this back to what we\u2019ve seen previously on the much smaller scale stellar-mass black holes\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have solved the mystery of when black holes \u201cburp\u201d \u2013 when the astronomical bodies launch jets after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-773575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}