Supermassive Black Hole NGC 4945 Snacking
This supermassive black hole in galaxy NGC 4945, which is more than 12 million light-years away, was captured with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile using a special tool called the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE). The coolest thing about it is how it catches the black hole “playing with its food”—a fancy way to say it’s messing with the stuff around it.


Supermassive Black Hole NGC 4945 Snacking
This one’s hard at work eating up gas and dust close by—but where does it all end up? As it gets pulled in, the stuff swirls into a flat ring, called an accretion disk, that circles around the black hole. The super-strong pull heats everything up so much that it glows brightly in different kinds of light, including the regular light MUSE picked up.

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Supermassive Black Hole NGC 4945 Snacking
The image also shows something amazing—super-fast jets of stuff shooting out into space almost as quick as light. Experts think these jets come from near the black hole’s event horizon (the spot where nothing, not even light, can get out) because of interactions between the magnetic fields and the spinning accretion disk. In the MUSE photo, you can see these jets hitting the space around them, making bright patches that show how messy this black hole is with its meal.
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