Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

50 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 SPACE CHRONICLES Counter-rotating flows around a black hole by ALMA Observatory A t the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/ sub- millimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe. “Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner or- bits around the black hole,” explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper pub- lished in The Astrophysical Journal . “Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions.” Supermassive black holes already ex- isted when the Universe was young,