Using data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have gained new insights into the eating habits of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies throughout the universe. These black holes often fluctuate in brightness from the massive clumps of cosmic material falling into them.
However, this is not true for the black holes located at the centers of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies. Instead, they remain fairly quiet and rarely ever vary in brightness. To find the cause of the decreased activity around the black holes, a new study used observations from Spitzer and Hubble to model the black hole and the material surrounding it at the center of the Andromeda galaxy.