Andrea Maselli

At the center of a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of gas and dust — a giant cosmic funnel of matter. A small compact object, such as another stellar-mass black hole, may find itself in this disk.

In the centers of many galaxies slumber supermassive black holes, surrounded by accretion disks and the activity of active galactic nuclei. When a compact object — such as a stellar-mass black hole — orbits them, a gravitational duet is born.