We piggy-backed

 We piggy-backed 

on NASA's asteroid defense effort to watch more than 5,000 of the fastest-growing black holes in the sky for five years, in an attempt to understand why this twinkling occurs. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we report our answer: a kind of turbulence driven by friction and intense gravitational and magnetic fields.

Gigantic star-eaters

We study supermassive black holes, the kind that sit at the centers of galaxies and are as massive as millions or billions of suns.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has one of these giants at its center, with a mass of about four million suns. For the most part, the 200 billion or so stars that make up the rest of the galaxy (including our sun) happily orbit around the black hole at the center.