Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies in cosmic deserts of the universe, where neighbors are rare and stellar nourishment is scarce, still manage to munch on material more often than their counterparts in more crowded areas of the galaxy, new research suggests.
In the past decade, astronomers have debated whether galaxy mergers — similar to the one underway between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy — are the main triggers that strip material from galaxies and funnel it to colossal black holes at their centers. New observations, which found over 20,000 "hungry" black holes in lonely slices of the universe known as cosmic voids, show that these invisible beasts "snack" more often when there are fewer interacting neighbors to interrupt them.
