Mark Megahan
The James Webb Space Telescope is such a miracle of modern engineering that it captures images in startlingly clear detail. One recent slice of observation time zoomed in on the black hole which sits smack in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The snapshots it took of Sagittarius A* “reveal an unexpectedly turbulent environment.” Astronomers are calling it “a veritable firework display of light.”
Webb Zooms in close
Every time a new set of images come out from the James Webb Telescope, they continue to “push back the frontiers of our knowledge of the Universe.” The team is calling it’s latest feat “an unprecedented plunge into the very heart of the Milky Way.”
Since that’s only 26,000 light-years away, getting a good shot is easy. The ultra-sensitive instrument can see clear to the other side of the universe.
Astronomers targeted the “supermassive black hole” named Sagittarius A*. What they got back were photographs of “unrivaled precision.”
The Webb images “reveal a fascinating spectacle,” the team declares. “An incessant ballet of lights and flashes, far from the static image we might expect of such a cosmic monster.”
The data gathered by Webb is spectacularly better than what the experts had to work with before. Nobody even caught a glimpse of Sgr A* until three years ago.
That’s when the Event Horizon Telescope “gave us the first direct image.” The ones coming in from JWST reveal “a complex and surprising dynamic.”
Near-Infrared Camera
You can thank the Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera for the best images. NIRCam “was mobilized for 48 hours, spread over several periods in 2023 and 2024.” That let the team scrutinize the black hole’s accretion disk.
That’s the “spiral of gas and dust heated to millions of degrees that swirls around the black hole before being engulfed by it.”
They weren’t expecting to see it acting like “an unpredictable cosmic beacon.” The latest Webb data paints “a striking picture.” Everyone expected “a dark, silent abyss.” Instead they got fireworks.
Specifically, “the scientists, led by Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University, observed a constant parpadeo, interspersed with intense and seemingly random eruptions of light.”
Webb provides more than enough detail for the experts to confirm “light emissions appear on two levels.” One is “a faint, continuous component, probably due to internal turbulence in the accretion disk.” Then, there are “brief but extremely bright flares, associated with magnetic reconnection phenomena.” Those are like really huge solar flares.
The best stuff was captured because one of Webb Telescope’s “major assets is its ability to simultaneously observe two infrared wavelengths.” That gives it stereo vision which lets researchers “compare variations in flare brightness as a function of wavelength.” They learned a lot from what they saw.
