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"This finding suggests that the region was likely frictionally locked and slowly accumulating stress over time leading up to the rupture," said Yong.

"Surprisingly, a simple geometrical description underlies the yielding transition observed, despite involving large and complex shape changes coupled with frictional interactions."

Gas and dust swirling toward the black hole form an accretion disk around it and heat up through gravitational and frictional forces, creating the variability.

"Earthquakes and tectonic phenomena follow scale-invariant laws, so findings from our laboratory-scale frictional setup are relevant for understanding remote earthquake triggering by seismic waves in much larger-scale faults in the Earth's crust," says Farain.

An active galaxy has an unusually bright and variable center powered by a supermassive black hole that heats a surrounding disk of gas and dust through gravitational and frictional forces.