English: The Circinus Galaxy, a galaxy about 13 million light-years away, contains an active supermassive black hole that continues to influence its evolution. The largest source of infrared light from the region closest to the black hole itself was thought to be outflows, or streams of superheated matter that fire outward.

Now, new observations from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope provide evidence that reverses this thinking, suggesting that most of the hot, dusty material is actually feeding the central black hole. The technique used to gather this data also has the potential to analyze the outflow and accretion components for other nearby black holes.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a full view of the Circinus galaxy, a nearby spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away. The inset highlights a close-up from Webb of the galaxy’s core, where infrared observations pierce through dust to reveal hot material feeding its central supermassive black hole. Webb’s image, made using the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) tool on its NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) instrument, isolates hot dust in the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black hole, revealing that most of the infrared emission comes from a compact, dusty structure feeding the black hole rather than from outflowing material. In the Webb image, the inner face of the torus glows in infrared light, while the darker areas represent where the outer ring is blocking light.

The research, which includes the sharpest image of a black hole’s surroundings ever taken by Webb, was published today in Nature. Learn more about this result here.

[Image description: Image shows a large spiral galaxy that has a bright white center, with several lanes of reddish-brown dust and gas in between faint white arms. The galaxy takes up the center third of the frame. There are several thousand stars, some with diffraction spikes, scattered around the image. This image is labeled Hubble. A small box outlining an area at the center of the galaxy leads to a pullout square at the top right. The image, labeled Webb, is dark with a white glowing oval at the center.]

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, E. Lopez-Rodriguez (University of South Carolina), D. Thatte (STScI), Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI). Acknowledgment: NSF's NOIRLab, CTIO; CC BY 4.0