Hey, Space Placers!
Caption
This artist’s concept portrays the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (A-star). It’s surrounded by a swirling accretion disk of hot gas. The black hole’s gravity bends light from the far side of the disk, making it appear to wrap above and below the black hole.
Several flaring hot spots that resemble solar flares, but on a more energetic scale, are seen in the disk. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected both bright flares and fainter flickers coming from Sagittarius A*. The flickers are so rapid they must originate very close to the black hole.
See the actual video of observations. Check it out
Caption
This timelapse video compresses about 9 hours of infrared observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into 30 seconds. Webb observed the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (A-star). Webb detected both faint flickers and brighter flares (one of which is seen near the end of the video). These brightness fluctuations may originate from two different processes.
The apparent change in size of the central light source is an instrumental effect. The black hole’s accretion disk is less than one pixel in size in the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) images used to create this movie. The images combine data at wavelengths of 2.1 and 4.8 microns.
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