Five years of flickering black holes

 Five years of flickering black holes

In our new work, we used data from NASA's ATLAS telescope in Hawaii. It scans the entire sky every night (weather permitting), monitoring for asteroids approaching Earth from the outer darkness.

These whole-sky scans also happen to provide a nightly record of the glow of hungry black holes, deep in the background. Our team put together a five-year movie of each of those black holes, showing the day-to-day changes in brightness caused by the bubbling and boiling glowing maelstrom of the accretion disk.

The twinkling of these black holes can tell us something about accretion disks.

In 1998, astrophysicists Steven Balbus and John Hawley proposed a theory of "magneto-rotational instabilities" that describes how magnetic fields can cause turbulence in the disks. If that is the right idea, then the disks should sizzle in regular patterns. They would twinkle in random patterns that unfold as the disks orbit. Larger disks orbit more slowly with a slow twinkle, while tighter and faster orbits in smaller disks twinkle more rapidly.