Black holes are pretty strange, sucking in not only nearby matter but also the space around it. These cosmic vacuum cleaners are powered by thin, gaseous accretion disks in orbit around them. Something drives the orbiting gas to spiral in toward the black hole, where all trace of it disappears forever into the singularity. One of the exciting challenges in astrophysics is to figure out the physics driving this process, which keeps black holes growing for billions of years after they're formed.