What does it look like near a supermassive black hole?

Supermassive black holes sit in the centers of all massive galaxies. Many of these giants are actively accreting material, earning them the name active galactic nuclei or AGN. As material falls in toward the black hole, it creates a disk that shines brightly and can even generate huge outbursts and jets. Compared with a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light-years across, the accretion disk around a supermassive black hole and the dusty structure that surrounds it are extremely small — on the order of just tens of light-years across. But two recent studies are finally giving us the up-close look we need to test our current models of supermassive black hole growth and evolution.