Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Northwestern astrophysicists gained the longest, most detailed glimpse yet of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They found the black hole's accretion disk emits a constant stream of flares with no periods of rest.

This video shows the 2.1 micron data taken on April 7, 2024, covering 9.5 hours of observation with individual frame of 18.25 seconds. A big flare appears toward the end of the observation.

Credit: Farhad Yusef-Zadeh/Northwestern University
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