SEATTLE - Black holes love to feast. Among their favorite food is gas. Today, astronomers announced they've made the most detailed observations ever of giant clouds of gas very near a colossal black hole.

On the black hole's dinner plate was carbon monoxide. Some of it will almost surely be consumed, the researchers say. Scientists have struggled to observe these final stages of consumption, because black holes are far away and because the eating generates a lot of light that drowns out what's happening.

For this reason, the observations were made with a radio telescope.

"We have hints that some of the cold gas clouds may be moving toward the galactic center," said Johannes Staguhn, a radio astronomer at NASA and the Science Systems and Applications corporation.

Staguhn and his colleagues studied a highly active galaxy, called a quasar, that is some 800 million light years away. Quasars shines fiercely. The new observations are a step toward determining if there is a link between star formation and the bright activity of quasars, which is thought to be generated when stuff falls into a supermassive central black hole.

The thinking goes like this: While some of the gas in the clouds collapses under its own weight to form stars, a portion of it leaks inward toward the black hole. The immense gravity of the black hole accelerates the gas to nearly the speed of light, superheating it and creating tremendous radiation before most of the gas is swallowed.

The gas clouds orbit about 4,000 light-years from the quasar's center, at a speed of nearly 125 miles every second (200 kps). They contain the mass of more than a billion suns.

The researches also found evidence that the quasar might be interacting with a neighboring galaxy. Galaxy mergers are thought to fuel star formation, and Staguhn is eager to learn whether the same is true when quasars absorb other galaxies.

The observations were made with the National Science Foundation's Berkeley Illinois Maryland Association (BIMA) radio telescope array at Hat Creek, Calif.