Cool Gas Circles Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

"'This is the first indication of accretion with a direction of rotation,' says Lena Murchikova, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and lead author of a study reporting the new results, published June 5 in the journal Nature. Murchikova and her colleagues used data gathered in 2015 by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to discover the thin accretion disk of material extremely close to the black hole that is sending streams of material spiraling inward. Earlier studies had revealed a more distant disk of warm gas farther away from the black hole which may feed the newfound cooler disk."

Read more at Scientific American, and find further coverage of the team's Nature paper at ScienceNews and Space.com.