When It Comes To Burping Jets, Supermassive Black Holes and Stellar-Mass Black Holes Have The Same Table Manners

What happened

The more material a black hole can capture, the faster it can consume matter and the more active it is. Both stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes can produce ionized jets streaming from their poles.

Stellar-mass black holes consume the material of companion stars, while supermassive black holes rip stars apart in tidal disruption events. Despite these different eating habits, the formation of jets requires similar conditions.

These trails of ionized gas stream away from a black hole at near light speed. They form when a black hole consumes matter and forms an accretion disk of hot plasma.

Inactive black holes don't produce jets, making them harder to discover. This is the focus of a new study in Nature Astrophysics .

Stellar-mass black holes are usually active because of a companion star. If a black hole closely orbits a stellar companion, it can strip the outer layers of the star and consume the material.

The faster a black hole consumes matter, the more heat and light it produces. This maximum rate of consumption is known as the Eddington Limit.

Key facts

• Despite these different eating habits, the formation of jets — requires: similar conditions