Credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI); Science: NASA, ESA, and J. Kaastra (SRON, the Netherlands)
Hubble Detects Gas Filament Eclipsing Black Hole.
This diagram shows the position of a dark, absorbing cloud of material located high above the supermassive black hole and accretion disk in the center of the active galaxy NGC 5548. The Hubble Space Telescope didn't
directly photograph the intervening cloud, but through spectroscopy
noted its passage in front of the black hole. Numerous other filaments twist around the black hole as they are swept away by a torrent of radiation "winds."