“In addition to stars, gas clouds can also be disrupted by SMBHs and their binaries,” they said in the same study. “The main difference is that the clouds can be comparable or even larger than the binary separation, unlike stars, which are always much smaller. “
Looking at the results of a previous study that numerically modeled this type of situation also suggested a gas cloud. Like the hypothetical supermassive binary black hole in the model, AT 2021hdr would collect large amounts of material whenever the black holes were halfway through their orbits around each other and had to cross the cloud to complete the orbit – their gravity ripping away part of the cloud . , which end up in their accretion disks every time they cross them. They are now believed to take up between three and thirty percent of the cloud every few cycles. That's a lot of gas from a cloud that big.
The supermassive black holes in AT 2021hdr are predicted to collide and merge in another 70,000 years. They are also part of another merger, with their host galaxy gradually merging with a nearby galaxy, first discovered by the same team (this has no effect on the BSMBH tidal disruption of the gas cloud).
How AT 2021hdr's behavior evolves could tell us more about its nature and confirm or refute the idea that it is eating away at a cloud of gas rather than a star or something else. For now, it appears that these black holes are not only getting gas from what they eat, but also eating the gas itself.
Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2024. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451305
