Jetting Away from a Black Hole
A disk of gas around a supermassive black hole is blowing "jets" of electrically charged particles out of the center of a galaxy in this image, which combines visible, radio, and X-ray views of the galaxies. The black hole is one billion times as massive as the Sun. It's probably encircled by a disk of superhot gas. Magnetic fields eject some of this material away from the poles of the black hole at almost the speed of light. The jets are shown in red in this image, while the blue is the X-ray glow of hot gas between the galaxies in a cluster. [Credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. Waterloo/B.McNamara/ESA/STScI/NRAO/Ohio Univ./L.Birzan et al.] 
For more information, visit StarDate's Black Holes Encyclopedia.
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