ALT Some supermassive black holes rapidly consume surrounding matter while simultaneously firing powerful streams of plasma into space at nearly the speed of light. This creates a physical puzzle. A research team has now found evidence that helps resolve this mystery. By combining observations from XRISM with international networks of radio and millimeter telescopes, the team identified the conditions that allow a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole to launch a powerful relativistic jet. The observations indicate that the cold, relatively flat accretion disk ends at about 20 times the black hole's radius. Beyond this point, it transitions into a hot flow of plasma reaching hundreds of millions of degrees. This hot environment can allow magnetic fields to accumulate around the black hole. These magnetic fields are thought to extract some of the rotational energy of the black hole and channel it into a powerful jet.