this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Hold up, black holes can just wake up?
When the conditions are right for them to start feeding on matter again, sure.
While I don't know the exact processes that turn feeding events on or off, I suspect that the energy released from an accretion disk can disturb enough material in the surrounding area to cause more material to fall into the black hole, causing even more chaos.
Once this activity dies down, it may take quite a while for something with enough mass to get close enough to trigger another event. (Just spit balling, I would speculate it would have to be a gas cloud with the mass of several hundred [thousands?] stars or so.)
Or, I could be completely misremembering how this process works. The important bit is that black holes are suspected to go through spurts of feeding.
Oh ok, so it's more like a rolling ball effect, I guess. The initial event due to proximity just kinda gets the rest of the process going. That's better than black holes waking up from their slumber to be predators lol
Yeah, absolutely a rolling ball effect. It's probably a difficult process to kick-off as the immediate surrounding space of an inactive black hole is going to be super super empty. (Any small stuff nearby would just get monched with no trace.)
Once the process starts though......