新托福阅读材料：CometsFoundOrbitingMonsterBlackHole(1)

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　Ghostly "comets" have been found orbiting near the mouth of a supermassive black hole, a new study says.  
　　A team of European and U.S. astronomers recently used Japan's Suzaku space telescope to study radiation pouring out of a black hole that's ten million times the mass of our sun. This monster black hole sits at the core of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365, 56 million light-years from Earth.

　　Thanks to a fortuitous alignment of the space telescope and the black hole, astronomers were able to detect weird, comet-shaped clouds orbiting close to the black hole at breakneck speeds of thousands of miles a second.
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& V5 h' r. Z( u; Z0 H+ c8 S) s% D　　"Unlike mountain-size icy comets found in our solar system, the ones we are seeing are made of stellar-size, superhot gaseous remains of stars ripped apart by black holes," said study co-author James Reeves of Keele University in the U.K.
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　　The unusual discovery suggests that all supermassive black holes might have comet-like clouds, which may change how astronomers model the way these cosmic predators devour their stellar prey, the study authors say.

　　"Comets" Seen Eclipsing the Black Hole
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/ [: s3 Y% l+ i( ]+ P　　Matter is constantly falling into the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, forming what are called accretion disks of superhot material that orbit the black holes.

　　A jet of high-energy particles streaming from the mouth of the black hole creates a bright point of light as seen by Suzaku's x-ray eye.
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　　Similar to the way the moon blots out sunlight during a solar eclipse, the orbiting clouds darkened the team's x-ray readings as they passed between Earth and the central black hole in NGC 1365.