mid-infrared flare in Saggitarius A tagged posts

Using the MIRI instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of scientists made the first-ever detection of a mid-IR flare from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive blackhole at the heart of the Milky Way. In simultaneous radio observations, the team found a radio counterpart of the flare lagging behind in time. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Scientists have been actively observing Sagittarius A* (Sgr A)—a supermassive black hole roughly 4 million times the mass of the sun— since the early 1990s. Sgr A regularly exhibits flares that can be observed in multiple wavelengths, allowing scientists to see different views of the same flare and better understand how it emits light and how the emission is generated...