Something about the Blackholes.

Astronomers believe they have a new way of calculating the size of supermassive black holes: by investigating the feeding modes of these invisible giants.

Scientists have long observed patterns of flickering in the brightness of accretion discs, the fat ring of matter attracted by the gravity of a black hole. But the researchers were not certain of the cause of the glitter. 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.

To examine any connection between supermassive black hole size and the flickering light of the disk it feeds from, the scientists began by selecting 67 of these behemoths, each with a previously estimated mass of between 10,000 and 10 billion times that of our sun. (Supermassive black holes are much larger than stellar black holes, which arise from a single exploding star and have masses three to ten times larger than those of our sun.

When that data seemed to show a correlation, the researchers decided to look at much smaller objects with accretion disks as well: white dwarfs, which are the many smaller dense remnants of stars like our sun that have exploded.

The scientists hope that the same relation will contain objects having masses between these two classes. An especially interesting variation would be an intermediate black hole, according to the researchers, given that scientists have identified only one of these objects to date.

"Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH [intermediate black hole] might look like," Colin Burke, the other co-lead author on the research and an astronomy graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in the statement.

And scientists will soon have a new treasure trove of data that could mask the flickering of intermediate black holes when Vera C. The Rubin Observatory in Chile is carrying out a decade-long study in 2023.

The research is set out in a paper published on Thursday (August. 12) in the journal Science.