Anatomy of a Black Hole’s Surroundings Revealed: Major Study Includes Observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

NASA—(ENEWSPF)— A fleet of spacecraft, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has uncovered unprecedented details in the surroundings of a supermassive black hole. Observations reveal huge bullets of gas being driven away from the gravitational monster. Furthermore, there is a corona of extremely hot gas hovering above the disk of matter that is falling into the black hole.

A team led by Jelle Kaastra of SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research utilized data from ESA’s XMM-Newton…