"Comets" Found Orbiting Monster Black Hole
Ghostly, comet-shaped clouds of gas have been spotted orbiting near the mouth of a supermassive black hole, a new study says.
A team of European and U.S. astronomers recently used Japan's Suzaku space telescope to study radiation pouring out of a black hole that's ten million times the mass of our sun. This monster black hole sits at the core of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365, 56 million light-years from Earth.
(Related: "Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe?")
Thanks to a fortuitous alignment of the space telescope and the black hole, astronomers were able to detect weird, comet-shaped clouds orbiting close to the black hole at breakneck speeds of thousands of miles a second.
"Unlike mountain-size icy comets found in our solar system, the ones we are seeing
