With the imaging spectrograph blocking out the bright light from the region at the heart of the quasar, Hubble was able to see the structure around the black hole like never before.
Bin Ren of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in France explained in a NASA statement that Hubble found lots of “weird things” around the feeding supermassive black hole powering 3C 273.
“We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure,” Ren said. “This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.”
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