In the centers of most galaxies lurk gigantic black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. Most of them are just minding their own business, but in about 10% of cases they are actively consuming matter and transforming much of it into vast amounts of energy. We call these gluttons “quasars”—supermassive black holes surrounded by bright, hot disks of gas called accretion disks. Although quasars are among the most luminous objects in the Universe, we still do not understand the detailed physics of how this matter behaves. This is now changing thanks to new insights and advances from an unexpected source: the highly sensitive timing satellites used to search for planets around other stars by continuously monitoring their brightness over time, to search for periodic dips caused by transiting planets.