A team of astrophysicists, led by Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to observe the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The study found that the black hole is constantly emitting flares and flickers, with no periods of rest. This unique behavior could help physicists better understand the nature of black holes.
The researchers observed the black hole for a total of 48 hours using the JWST’s near-infrared camera, which can simultaneously observe two infrared colors for long stretches of time. The observations revealed five to six big flares per day and several small sub-flares in between. The level of activity occurs over a wide range of time, from short interludes to long stretches.
Yusef-Zadeh suspects that two separate processes are responsible for the short bursts and longer flares. He likens the event to a solar flare, where minor disturbances within the accretion disk generate faint flickers, while magnetic reconnection events cause big, bright flares. The researchers also discovered a time delay between events observed at different wavelengths, which could provide more clues about the physical processes occurring around the black hole.
The study provides new insights into the fundamental nature of black holes and their interaction with their surroundings. Yusef-Zadeh hopes to use the JWST to observe Sagittarius A* for an uninterrupted 24 hours to reduce noise and see even finer details. The longer observation run could help determine whether these flares show periodicity or are truly random.
The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed journal that covers a wide range of topics in astrophysics. The study is available on arXiv and provides new information about the behavior of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-02-flickers-flares-jwst-reveals-milky.html