The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered its clearest view yet of a supermassive black hole's immediate surroundings, NASA announced Tuesday (Jan. 13).
The snapshots show that the intense infrared glow in active galaxies comes not from powerful outflows, as long assumed, but from a dense disk of gas and dust feeding the black hole, NASA said in a statement.
In the image above, a close-up inset of the galaxy's core reveals the inner face of a glowing, donut-shaped disk of gas and dust, known as a torus, while darker patches mark a second, more distant ring surrounding the black hole.
"It is the first time a high-contrast mode of Webb has been used to look at an extragalactic source," study co-author Julien Girard, a senior research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in the statement.
The team observed Circinus twice, in July 2024 and March 2025, using an instrument on Webb that gathers and combines light from the galaxy through a specially designed aperture with seven small hexagonal openings. These openings produce patterns that allowed the research team to isolate the hot dust and map small-scale structures at the galaxy's center that are normally hidden, according to NASA.
"This allows us to see images twice as sharp," study co-author Joel Sanchez-Bermudez of the National University of Mexico said in the statement. "Instead of Webb's 6.5-meter diameter, it's like we are observing this region with a 13-meter space telescope."
The data reveal that about 87 percent of the infrared emission from hot dust originates from the region closest to the black hole, concentrated in a flattened disk aligned with the galaxy's equatorial plane. This structure forms the inner portion of the dusty torus and acts as the primary reservoir funneling material inward to feed the black hole, the study finds.
By contrast, less than 1 percent of the emission comes from a faint arc-shaped structure, dubbed the "North Arc," where hot dust is being swept up in an outflow blasted outward by the black hole's activity. The remaining 12% arises from dust farther from the center, likely heated by the black hole's radiation and a small radio jet, but lying outside the main feeding region, the study notes.
These findings challenge decades-old models that attributed much of the infrared excess near active black holes to dusty outflows. That idea arose largely because earlier telescopes lacked the resolution needed to separate light from the accretion disk, the dusty torus and outflows, blending all of these structures into a single unresolved glow, according to the NASA statement.
Understanding black hole growth is central to understanding galaxy evolution. As black holes feed, they can also release enormous amounts of energy back into their surroundings, which can suppress or trigger star formation and shape a galaxy's overall structure.
By clearly distinguishing material falling inward to feed the black hole from dust being pushed outward in energetic winds, the new Webb observations provide a crucial step toward understanding how supermassive black holes grow and influence their host galaxies, researchers say.
The dusty torus observed in Circinus is thought to be common among active black holes throughout the universe, and the research team says it is eager to apply the new technique validated in this study to explore the immediate environments of other nearby black holes.
"We need a statistical sample of black holes, perhaps a dozen or two dozen, to understand how mass in their accretion disks and their outflows relate to their power," Lopez-Rodriguez said in the statement.
The results were published on Jan. 13 in Nature Communications.
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