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Gas undergoing Bondi accretion onto a supermassive black hole (SMBH) becomeshotter toward smaller radii. We searched for this signature with a Chandraobservation of the hot gas in NGC 3115, which optical observations show has avery massive SMBH. Our analysis suggests that we are resolving, for the firsttime, the accretion flow within the Bondi radius of an SMBH. We show that thetemperature is rising toward the galaxy center as expected in all accretionmodels in which the black hole is gravitationally capturing the ambient gas.There is no hard central point source that could cause such an apparent rise intemperature. The data support that the Bondi radius is at about 4 arcsec-5arcsec (188-235 pc), suggesting an SMBH of 2 x 10^9 M_sun that is consistentwith the upper end of the optical results. The density profile within the Bondiradius has a power-law index of 1.03^{+0.23}_{-0.21} which is consistent withgas in transition from the ambient medium and the accretion flow. The accretionrate at the Bondi radius is determined to be {\dot M}_B = 2.2 x 10^{-2} M_sunyr^{-1}. Thus, the accretion luminosity with 10% radiative efficiency at theBondi radius (10^{44} erg s^{-1}) is about six orders of magnitude higher thanthe upper limit of the X-ray luminosity of the nucleus.

Resolving the Bondi Accretion Flow toward the Supermassive Black Hole of NGC 3115 with Chandra