Central region of a supermassive black hole

An artist’s impression of matter spiralling inwards, pulled by the strong gravity of a central supermassive black hole, forming an “accretion disk”. Friction heats the infalling material to high temperatures producing intense ultraviolet light. This is reprocessed by hot plasma (extremely high temperature matter) believed to exist very close to the black hole — the “corona” — to produce energetic X-ray light.