The Blackhole in the Milkly Way is doing some straaaaange things (don't worry we aren't gonna die....yet)

 sorry to burst your cosmic bubble but this is just a still image of GARGANTUA from the Awesome sci-fi flick INTERSTELLAR. Maybe you already knew that, maybe not, either way full transparency....

(Image Source: The movie "Interstellar")

So I was reading some science articles today, and one tends to do, and I can across some galactic gossip: We got some crazy flaring going on in what was described as ranging from "flickers to brilliant eruptions" going on in the supermassive blackhole Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star). 

The long and short of it is this: The studies and observations surrounding the blackhole by this team of scientists is to see how the immediate environment, especially the accretion disk, reacts. Lately they have been studying the cause and effect of these flares and gathering data that will better help understand this illusive phenomena. 

"The observations detailed the extreme environment in the immediate vicinity of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Sagittarius A* is about four million times the mass of the Sun, and it’s surrounded by a disk of material sucked towards the black hole by the object’s inexorable gravity. According to a Northwestern University release, the recent observations are the longest and most detailed yet of the black hole."-Source: Gizmodo.com

This is an Artist rendering of the flares

Apparently the black hole’s accretion disk is burbling with energetic flares, and thanks to the GOAT telescope JAMES WEBB we have been able to study it, mainly due to its Near Infrared Camera (NIRcam). According to the article Sagittarius A* flares at X-ray wavelengths, but more often in the infrared, making it a prime target for the Webb telescope’s perceptive infrared gaze. The telescope observed Sagittarius A* for a total of 48 hours, over the last year. The team was even able to observe the black hole at MANY different points to understand how its flaring changed over the course of time. 

“Flares are expected to happen in essentially all supermassive black holes, but our black hole is unique,” said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astronomer at Northwestern and lead author of the study, in a university release. “It is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state. We observed the black hole multiple times throughout 2023 and 2024, and we noticed changes in every observation.”- Source: Gizmodo.com

Source article: The Milky Way’s Black Hole Is Producing a Brilliant Light Show