No one in their right mind would probably want to get anywhere near a black hole in order to observe it. Fortunately, researchers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were able to do just that. They utilized the Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array and telescopes to observe the phenomenon's innermost region.

The NSF researchers studied black holes in the BL Lacertae galaxy located 950 million light years from Earth. What they did was to observe outbursts from that galaxy from late 2005 to 2006. They noted bursts of photons oriented in a way that was actually predicted by theories - theories about twisted magnetic fields of black holes.

Based on what the NSF has observed, there is strong evidence that supermassive black holes tend to emit enormous jets of particles that corkscrew.  The NSF believes that this coiling effect is caused by  twisted magnetic fields acting on the particle streams.