Scientists solve mystery of black hole 'burps'; new study reveals when these cosmic objects launch powerful jets after eating stars

When a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole, gravity can tear the star apart in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event. Some of the debris gets swallowed, while the rest can be blasted back out in powerful jets, sometimes months or years after the star is destroyed. A new study titled ‘A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet information’ in Nature Astronomy, led by Curtin University's Adelle Goodwin and Andrew Mummery of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, has pinned down when these delayed burps occur.When black holes launch jets after tearing stars apartGoodwin and Mummery analysed 20 tidal disruption events using optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, and radio observations, narrowing the sample to 10 events where they could reliably model both the black hole's feeding rate and the timing of its radio jets. They found two distinct windows in which jets appear.