Supermassive black holes pose a paradox: their jets heat the surrounding gas so violently that they should starve themselves of fuel. The favoured resolution holds that the gas cools into thin filaments that rain back towards the centre, but the final link in the chain had never been directly observed. Astronomers led by Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of Université de Montréal have now seen it, publishing their results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Using about eight hours of time on the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec instrument, the team targeted NGC 4696, the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster some 145 million light-years away. Where Hubble had shown only a static S-shaped swirl of gas, Webb's resolution, sharp enough to pick out features roughly 30 light-years wide, revealed a spinning disk nearly 800 light-years across, with material moving at up to 600 kilometres per second and physically connected to a large infalling filament.
The observations complete a self-regulating cosmic cycle: jets heat the cluster gas, the gas cools and condenses into filaments that can stretch thousands of light-years, the filaments feed the disk, and the disk feeds the black hole, which fires its jets anew. Magnetic forces appear to brake the gas's rotation and steer it inward. The study, supported by the Canadian Space Agency and the first of three papers from this dataset, has already prompted new observing campaigns on similar systems.