THE slumbering giants at the heart of every galaxy don’t sleep forever. Astronomers have caught some of these black holes snacking on star systems and, in one case, a planet.
Every galaxy contains at its heart a supermassive black hole whose mass is between a million and a few billion times that of our Sun. But astronomers thought that the giant black holes in mature galaxies like our own were dormant, having already gobbled up any stars or gas in the immediate vicinity.
That’s not entirely true, says Niel Brandt at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. His student Jennifer Donley combined old data from the…
