HOW does a black hole gulp down matter? The question has puzzled astronomers for years, but now the Very Large Telescope in Chile has captured the process in detail.
NGC 1097, a spiral galaxy about 45 million light years from Earth, glows relatively brightly at its centre at visible and X-ray wavelengths, suggesting that a black hole is devouring surrounding gas and dust. But until now the glare from nearby stars made it impossible to get any good images of the process.
Almudena Prietro at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues used one of the VLT’s…
