Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño

A figure skater glides across the ice, gradually moving toward the center. Their trajectory isn't a perfect spiral: sometimes they catch the rhythm of the music and add an extra turn, slightly changing their speed. That's roughly how a small black hole behaves when it falls into a supermassive one.

Photographing the vicinity of a black hole is like shooting a fountain: a short exposure freezes the droplets, a long one blends everything into blurry streaks. Light from the superheated gas swirling around the hole reaches us along different paths. Some rays curve around it in an arc, others make multiple loops due to spacetime curvature.