Supermassive black hole’s mysterious hiccups' likely caused by neighboring black hole's 'punches'

A large black hole has a spinning disk around it. It also has a magnetic field represented as an orange cone on top and bottom of the black hole. A tiny black hole punches in and out through the disk as it orbits the larger one. Plum es from the large disk emerge when the tiny black hole travels. The plumes are especially strong in the magnetic fields.

A hiccuping supermassive black hole has alerted astronomers to a whole new type of black hole behavior. 

In 2020, a previously quiet black hole at the heart of a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth, and with a mass equivalent to 50 million suns, suddenly erupted, brightening the material around it by a factor of 1,000.