Astronomers think they have a new way to calculate the size of supermassive
black holes: by studying the feeding patterns of these invisible giants.
Scientists have long noticed flickering patterns in the brightness of accretion disks, the fat ring of matter pulled in by a black hole's
gravity. But researchers weren't sure what caused the flickering. Now, by studying dozens of known supermassive black holes, a team of astrophysicists has determined that the flickering of an accretion disk relates to the mass of the black hole swathed inside it — and the scientists believe that the same technique also applies to much, much smaller objects as well.
"These results suggest that the processes driving the flickering during accretion are universal, whether the central object is a supermassive black hole or a much more lightweight white dwarf," Yue Shen, a co-lead author on the new research and an astronomer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a
statement.
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