Move Over Ozempic: "Supermassive Black Holes Posses A Strange Mechanism That Prevents Overeating"

From Inverse, November 2:

A supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy violently shoves away 97 percent of its would-be food, disrupting star formation in the galaxy.

We think of supermassive black holes as gorging cosmic monsters, swallowing up anything that gets too close, but according to a recent study, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy called Circinus is actually a very picky eater.

Astrophysicist Takuma Izumi, of the National Astrophysical Observatory of Japan, and his colleagues used ALMA to take the highest-resolution look yet at the center of Circinus, and they found that the black hole only consumes about 3 percent of the gas that falls toward it. Radiation — released by material racing faster and faster as it spirals toward the supermassive black hole — pushes the rest of the gas back into the galaxy in fast-moving, turbulent streams. The researchers published their work in the journal Science.

“No, Thank You,” Says Supermassive Black Hole

Izumi and his colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array — 66 radio telescope antennas in the highlands of Chile — to map the flow of gas in the innermost region of the Circinus galaxy, 13.05 million light years away.

Specifically, they watched the innermost 1 percent of the galaxy, spanning a distance from about 325 light years to about 32.5 light years from the supermassive black hole., which is about 1.7 million times more massive than our Sun. That’s such a narrow area that it’s hard to see in much detail, but ALMA’s array of radio dishes let Izumi and his colleagues watch the action with about 1.6 to 8.5 light-year resolution. And what they saw was the black hole shoving away most of the gas that fell toward it.

The ALMA data revealed a messy, chaotic disk of gas swirling around the black hole. As gas falls inward from farther out in the galaxy, it ends up in what’s called an accretion disk: a spiral of material swirling around the black hole, accelerated to tremendous speeds by the black hole’s powerful gravity. Think of it as a highway at rush hour; things move in fits and starts, attempts to merge end badly, and ultimately nothing actually flows smoothly....

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