It’s Becoming Clear Why Black Holes Never Run Out of Fuel
Researchers have identified a potential mechanism explaining how black holes maintain their fuel supply despite ejecting powerful energy jets. Observations of the NGC 4696 galaxy suggest that gas blown away by these jets cools and condenses into filaments that eventually fall back into the black hole.
Why it matters
This discovery helps solve a long-standing astrophysical mystery regarding how supermassive black holes continue to grow and influence the evolution of their host galaxies.
Black holes grow by consuming surrounding matter, but in the process they also eject powerful energy jets. These jets heat the surrounding gas, delaying the formation of new stars and affecting the growth of the galaxy as a whole.
This has long presented researchers with a puzzle. As a black hole emits jets and heats the surrounding gas, the gas that would otherwise be consumed by the black hole—that is, its energy source—is dispersed far away. And yet, why is it that black holes do not “run out of fuel” and instead continue to grow?
To explain this mystery, researchers proposed the following hypothesis: Gas blown away by the heat eventually cools in interstellar space and condenses into thin, thread-like structures called filaments. These filaments then fall back toward the black hole.
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