A new simulation shows black holes ripping apart and consuming their accretion disk in a matter of months, which may explain why some quasars quickly brighten and dim
Supermassive black holes may tear apart and devour their disk of surrounding dust and gas at a shocking speed, perhaps explaining the behavior of a mysterious class of rapidly brightening quasar.
Early models of black holes couldn’t really explain changing-look quasars. These early models were limited, Kaaz says, because they assumed that a black hole and its accretion disk would be in alignment: both would exist along the same plane and rotate in the same direction. “Now we have the power of these really powerful computer simulations, so we can probe more complicated questions,” he says.
This galactic-level game of tug-of-war causes spacetime itself to warp. Because this warping strengthens closer to the event horizon, the accretion disk begins to pull apart, and the inner disk separates from the outer disk, Kaaz and his colleagues reported on September 20 in the Astrophysical Journal. These two disks violently crash into each other, Kaaz says, and the force of the outer disk pushes material from the inner disk into the black hole.
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