Black holes eat their way through galaxies by employing a complex repertoire of buffet manners, according to an international team of astronomers led by the University of Pretoria’s Dr Jack Radcliffe.
Dramatically diverse eating preferences drive this cosmic dining decorum: some black holes chew the stellar cud and savour their meals; others stage prolonged hunger strikes that leave them starving. When shredding objects into threads of atoms, smaller black holes just a few times the mass of our Sun spaghettify everything unlucky to get close enough.
Supermassive black holes behave as though they are the very centre of the universe, beaming high-energy radio jets across spacetime near the speed of light.