In this artist's rendering, a thick accretion disc has formed around a supermassive black hole following the tidal disruption of a star that wandered too close. Stellar debris has fallen toward the black hole and collected into a thick chaotic disc of hot gas. Flashes of X-ray light near the centre of the disc result in light echoes that allow astronomers to map the structure of the funnel-like flow, revealing for the first time strong gravity effects around a normally quiescent black hole. Illustration credits: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University.