Astronomers stunned: our supermassive black hole just broke all known rules

A Black Hole That Just Won’t Sit Still Watching flickers or bursts of light erupting from the gas and dust—the so-called accretion disk—spinning around a supermassive black hole is nothing new for astronomers. But as Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, astrophysicist at Northwestern University (USA), puts it: “But the black hole at the center of our Milky Way seems unique in this regard.”

Astronomers stunned: our supermassive black hole just broke all known rules. A Black Hole That Just Won’t Sit Still Watching flickers or bursts of light erupting from the gas and dust—the so-called accretion disk—spinning around a supermassive black hole is nothing new for astronomers. But as Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, astrophysicist at Northwestern University (USA), puts it: “But the black hole at the center of our Milky Way seems unique in this regard.” His team observed Sagittarius A* using JWST multiple times between 2023 and 2024. What they saw left them completely baffled. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astrophysicists at Northwestern University (USA) have obtained the longest and most detailed view to date of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They discovered that the black hole’s accretion disk...