“This was intriguing, but without a way to obtain spectra of those stars, we could not really establish whether we were witnessing genuine accretion and the presence of disks, or just some artificial effects.”

Their answer to this state of affairs will be the steady, unremitting accretion and employment of power — defined predominantly in military terms — to serve narrowly defined national interests.

Eventually the entire accretion disk is torn in half, with the black hole first consuming the inner disc and then the outer one.

They can consume gas from their host galaxies in a process called accretion, and they can also merge with each other when two galaxies collide.

The team was motivated to take a closer look at flow patterns near the surface as conditions there resembled the unstable plasma flows in entirely different systems: the accretion disks around black holes.