When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Illustration of the black hole at the center of the galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4. | Credit: Max Planck Institute/Dream LabA supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy is behaving similarly to black holes that existed just after the Big Bang, voraciously feeding on copious amounts of matter. The relatively close cosmic titan could therefore provide insight into the much more distant universe.Indeed, the intense accretion behavior demonstrated by the supermassive black hole, which sits at the center of the galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 located 1.8 billion light-years away, is something scientists have only ever seen in the earliest supermassive black holes.AdvertisementAdvertisementSDSS J110546.07+145202.4 has been shining brightly in radio waves for many years, and these waves were the smoking gun that pointed to the feeding habits of the galaxy’s central black hole.”Such high-energy events can provide astronomers with a wealth of insights,” Kovi Rose from the University of Sydney’s Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in the statement. “By observing these jets and outbursts, we can study the physical processes in some of the most extreme environments in the universe.”Even the hungriest black holes are messy eatersAll large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their heart with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun. However, not all supermassive black holes accrete vast amounts of matter.For example, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, consumes so little gas and dust from its surroundings that, were it a human being, it would be existing on a diet of one grain of rice every million years. (That is one heck of a diet.)AdvertisementAdvertisementWhen black holes are surrounded by copious amounts of gas and dust, their immense gravitational influence causes this material, in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk, to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves to high-energy X-rays.Additionally, supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, meaning some of the matter i …
