Artist's impression of the whirlpool around a gigantic black hole

Detailed observations of the quasar 3C 273 with the GRAVITY instrument have revealled the structure of rapidly moving gas around the central super-massive black hole. Studying these black holes and determining their masses is an essential ingredient to understanding galaxy evolution in general.

This video shows a zoom from an optical image of the quasar to an artist’s impression of the surroundings of a supermassive black hole, composed of a dusty torus, very hot, infalling material and often a jet of material ejected at high speeds from the black hole’s poles. Astronomers are now able to spatially resolve the “broad line region”, where gas clouds whirl around the central black hole.