Plunge into a black hole. This visualization takes you on a journey to a supermassive black hole with a 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene. Scientists cr