Supermassive black holes reside at the center of most, if not all, massive (and possibly low-mass ) galaxies. They range in size from millions to billions of solar masses, and they can eat voraciously or not at all, depending on their surroundings. But one thing is clear: Black holes don’t have very good table manners, as a team led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder confirmed last week at the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.The team caught a supermassive black hole in the galaxy SDSS J1354+1327 (or J1354, for short) with a history of “snacking” on material in its vicinity, then letting out “burps” of energy as a result. In between meals, the black hole is relatively dormant. That dormant period lasted about 100,000 years, which is an eyeblink on cosmological timescales, but certainly not for humans. The work , presented at the Washington, D.C., meeting by Julie Comerford of the University of Colorado and published November 6 in The Astrophysical Journal , identifies two separate burps, or outflow events: one ancient burp on the verge of dissipating and one hinting at a much more recent meal. It is the first time two separate events have been identified for a single galaxy.J1354 is a galaxy identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; it sits about 800 million light-years away. Astronomers imaged J1354 in X-rays and optical light using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the W.M. Keck Observatory, and the Apache Point Observatory. By combining the data from these different images, they spotted a large, diffuse “cone” of gas extending 30,000 light years below the bulge of the galaxy (where the supermassive black hole is located). This gas is ionized — meaning its atoms have been stripped of their electrons — by a huge burst of radiation from the supermassive black hole that occurred about 100,000 years ago.