James Webb captures Jupiter’s shimmering aurora
NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope captured new details of auroras on Jupiter.
The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered new evidence that sheds light on what scientists know about black holes.
Launched more than four years ago, the infrared observatory, and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, was used to target a “supermassive black hole” located in the Circinus Galaxy, a neighboring galaxy about 13 million light-years away.
The data from the Webb telescope – built through an international partnership between the Canadian, European and American space agencies – helped researchers learn something new about what’s happening in and around the black hole, they reveal in the Jan. 13 issue of the journal Nature Communications.
Previous telescopes could detect an excess of infrared light emanating from the black hole; however, they didn’t have the resolution to determine its specific origin. Scientists theorized that “superheated matter” flowing out of the black hole generated the most infrared light, according to NASA.
Supermassive black hole is hotter on the inside than expected
New observations from the Webb telescope, captured in July 2024 and March 2025 – including the telescope’s sharpest image yet of a black hole’s surroundings – countermanded previous theories.
What did the Webb telescope find? Nearly all of the infrared emissions (87%) of hot dust in the Circinus black hole came from “the areas closest to the black hole, while less than 1% of emissions come from hot dusty outflows,” NASA said in the description of the research.
With an analysis of the data, “our observations and models suggest that the preferred component (of infrared light) is the heated dust in the funnel,” making up the inner surface of the donut-shaped ring around the black hole, lead author Enrique Lopez Rodriguez, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of South Carolina, told USA TODAY.
The remainder of the infrared light measured “arises from warm dust in the host galaxy outside the influence of the central black hole,” Lopez Rodriguez said.
While scientists had suspected the largest source of infrared light came from heated outflows firing from the black hole, “most of the infrared emission comes from a compact, dusty structure feeding the black hole rather than from outflowing material,” notes the European Space Agency in a commentary on the research.
These findings about the Circinus Galaxy black hole can serve as a test for researchers looking at other black holes, of which there are an estimated 100 million in the Milky Way alone, according to NASA.
Other black holes may reveal different findings. “Although Circinus is a prototypical active galaxy, the family of active galaxies are very broad. We need to study all the different stages of active galaxies to make a general statement,” Lopez Rodriguez said.
The Webb telescope’s enhanced infrared capabilities will allow scientists “to obtain a larger sample,” he added.
What is the Circinus Galaxy black hole?
As supermassive black holes, like the one in the Circinus Galaxy, consume gas and dust, a donut-shaped ring (called a “torus”) forms around the black hole, according to NASA. As the matter accumulates, a whirlpool-like structure called an “accretion disk” forms. As the matter swirls, friction builds, heat grows and infrared light is emitted.
Another recent finding, published in the Jan. 5 issue of Nature Astronomy, suggests that matter isn’t just sucked into black holes. (Note: the black hole doesn’t really suck in matter; its gravitational force is so strong it consumes anything that gets too close.)
Black holes can blast matter into space “as a focused jet or sweep it away in vast winds,” according to a news release describing a three-year study of a black hole in the Milky Way using NASA’s NICER X-ray telescope, aboard the International Space Station, and South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope.
“What we’re seeing could be described as an energetic tug of war … (happening). When the black hole fires off a high-speed plasma jet, the X-ray wind dies down, and when the wind starts up again, the jet vanishes,” said the study’s lead author, Jiachen Jiang, a physicist at the University of Warwick in the U.K., in a statement.
Throughout their study of black holes over the past decade, scientists used infrared measurements to model their structure. In the case of the Circinus Galaxy black hole, the infrared illumination from the black hole was so strong that astronomers couldn’t make out the source of the excess emissions.
However, one of the Webb telescope’s four main instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), features an Aperture Masking Interferometer that can capture higher-contrast and higher-resolution infrared data. “This allows us to see images twice as sharp,” said Joel Sanchez-Bermudez, a study co-author and astrophysicist based at the National University of Mexico, in the NASA report.
The Circinus black hole represents the first time “a high-contrast mode of Webb has been used to look at an extragalactic source,” said Julien Girard, the paper’s co-author and senior research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in the NASA report.
“We hope our work inspires other astronomers to use the Aperture Masking Interferometer mode to study faint, but relatively small, dusty structures in the vicinity of any bright object,” Girard said.
Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider & msnider@usatoday.com.