NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is providing the best look yet at the chaotic events unfolding around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, observing a steady flickering of light punctuated by occasional bright flares as material is drawn inward by its enormous gravitational pull.
Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data in 2022, is enabling astronomers to observe the region around the black hole - called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* - for extended periods for the first time, allowing them to discern patterns of activity. The region around Sgr A* was seen as bubbling with activity rather than remaining in a steady state.
The researchers observed a constant flickering of light from the swirling disk of gas surrounding the black hole - called an accretion disk. This flickering appears to be emanating from material very close to the event horizon, the point of no return beyond which everything - stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gets dragged into oblivion.
There also were occasional flares - around one to three large ones over any 24-hour period, with smaller bursts in between.
"The accretion disk is a very chaotic region filled with turbulence, and the gas gets even more chaotic and compressed as it approaches the black hole, under extreme gravity," said astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Illinois, lead author of the study published on Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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