Feeding black holes lurking at the center of most galaxies gulp nearby stars, gas and dust the same way irrespective of how hungry they are, new research suggests.
Until now, there appeared to be an order to these massacres. The hungriest of black holes, which also beam out very powerful radiation, were thought to "eat" one star about the size of our sun every year. Astronomers think matter collapses into disks around these very hungry cosmic beasts, which are then fed in a somewhat organized way. By contrast, less hungry black holes were thought to take something like 10 million years to consume a sun-sized star and are thought to be surrounded by chaotic streams of matter rather than neat disks.
