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Observation Of Material Circling A Supermassive Black Hole

Astronomers from the University of Oxford and around the world have observed clumps of X-ray-emitting gas whipping around a black hole at 33,000 kilometres per second, one-tenth the speed of light.

The observation marks the first time scientists have been able to trace individual blobs of gas on a complete journey around a massive black hole, and provides crucial measurements that have long been missing from black hole studies: both an orbital period and an orbital speed. These have allowed the astronomers to calculate a lower limit to the black hole mass of 300,000 times that of our Sun.