Tilting a black hole’s 'feeding disk' can make it eat ten times faster, solving the mystery of how baby black holes grew into giants so quickly.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
The nature of tilted supercritical accretion discs
arXiv · 2604.11794
The Takeaway
It explains how the earliest supermassive black holes in the universe reached their size so soon after the Big Bang, which standard 'straight' disks couldn't allow. The tilt creates extra pressure that bypasses the Eddington limit, the universal speed limit for cosmic growth.
From the abstract
In this paper, we report on the first 3D general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of large supercritical accretion discs that are tilted with respect to the black hole spin axis. We explore a range of black hole spin parameters (from $a_* = -0.9$ to 0.9), initial tilts (in the range from $\beta_0 = 0^\circ$ to $30^\circ$), and target mass accretion rates. We first confirm that, for all the untilted simulations, the Eddington accretion limit is obeyed ($\dot{M}_\mathrm{BH} \