‘For the first time, astronomers may have spotted energy coming out of a black hole, a spherical chasm in space and time from which nothing was thought to be able to escape.

The supermassive black hole lies in the heart of a galaxy 120 million light years away, where it spins in the middle of a gigantic disk of hot matter and energy. This “accretion disc” drags on the black hole, causing it to slow and lose energy, say researchers working with the orbiting XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.

The lost energy heats the inner edge of the accretion disk so that it produces telltale X-rays… Black holes that consume accretion disks are thought to power astronomical phenomena ranging from quasars to gamma ray bursts.’ New Scientist