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Black holes are wild!

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Yes, they are the
most compact things
we know of,

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so dense
that even past
a certain point,

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light cannot escape.

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Even though we can't
see inside them,

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the environments around
black holes are brimming

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with bizarre activity.

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There can be a corona
of hot electrons

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that occasionally spits out
scattered X-rays.

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There's a bright accretion
disk of gas and dust

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whose light is so warped by gravity

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you can see the near and far sides

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at the same time.

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And I can't even begin to
wrap my head
around this estimate:

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There can be jets
20 million light-years across.

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That is 140 Milky Ways
end-to-end.

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So if we can't see
black holes themselves,

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we need other ways
of understanding them,

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like these extreme surroundings.

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That's why NASA continues to create
new instruments to decode the chaos.

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This is

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Black Hole Environments,
Explained.