A year ago a team of radio astronomers startled the world with the first photograph of a black hole, lurking like the eye of Sauron in the heart of a distant galaxy. Now it appears there was more hiding in that image than we had imagined.

When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don’t just see the swirling sizzling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in. You can also see the whole universe. Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope.

“The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings,” said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not unlike the rings that form around your bathtub drain.