February 9, 2025

“Along with stars, gasoline clouds can be disrupted by SMBHs and their binaries,” they mentioned in the identical study. “The important thing distinction is that the clouds will be similar to and even bigger than the binary separation, not like stars, that are at all times a lot smaller. “

Trying on the outcomes of a previous study that numerically modeled one of these state of affairs additionally instructed a gasoline cloud. Similar to the hypothetical supermassive black gap binary within the mannequin, AT 2021hdr would accrete massive quantities of fabric each time the black holes have been midway via orbiting one another and needed to cross the cloud to finish the orbit—their gravity tears away a number of the cloud, which results in their accretion disks, each time they cross it. They’re now thought to soak up wherever between three and 30 p.c of the cloud each few cycles. From a cloud so enormous, that’s lots of gasoline.

The supermassive black holes in AT 2021hdr are predicted to crash into one another and merge in one other 70,000 years. They’re additionally a part of one other merger, during which their host galaxy is regularly merging with a close-by galaxy, which was first found by the identical staff (this has no impact on the BSMBH tidal disruption of the gasoline cloud).

How the habits of AT 2021hdr develops may inform us extra about its nature and uphold or disprove the concept that it’s consuming away at a gaseous cloud as a substitute of a star or one thing else. For now, it appears these black holes don’t simply get gasoline from what they eat—they eat the gasoline itself.

Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2024.  DOI:  10.1051/0004-6361/202451305