Hungry black holes chew stars apart with their immense gravitational fields, like pure appetite at the gates of hell. But a growing cadre of astrophysicists believe that it’s time to rethink a black hole’s ability to consume matter without limit.
A mass of a few tens of billion times that of the sun — admittedly enormous — may be the practical limit of ultramassive black holes in the universe.
“It’s not just that we’ve only had so much time since the universe formed for black holes to accrete matter and grow as large as the biggest ones are now,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, an associate professor of astronomy at Yale University currently on fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “It is a tighter limit than that, and it controls how much matter can funnel down to it.” Maybe, her work and that of others in the field suggests, the black hole itself says, “No more.”