Black holes are famous for being impossible to see directly. Everything that comes close to them, even light, gets sucked in by their enormously strong gravity, meaning the black holes themselves are dark. However, that doesn’t mean scientists can’t detect them. They can still see black holes like the famous Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy by looking just beyond the bounds of the black holes themselves. The boundary at which everything gets sucked into a black

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The study, published in ‘The Astrophysical Journal Letters,’ looked at what happens as a black hole feeds. The strong gravity from the black hole attracts gas, which slowly begins to spin as it comes closer to the event horizon. This spinning causes the gas to flatten into a disc shape, called an accretion disc, where the gas gets hotter and hotter over time. When gas passes the event horizon and falls into the black hole, it is informally referred to as feeding. But something interesting happens to some of this gas. Not all of it falls into the black hole, as some is thrown away from the black hole and into space — ‘much like how a messy toddler spills a lot of what lies on
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