A team led by Dr. Enrique Lopez-Rodríguez applied this technique to map the balance of outflow and accretion components near the black hole.

Further context and details are available on NASA’s Science mission page linked with the report.

Circinus serves as a test case for studying other black holes, with researchers stressing the need to examine multiple active galaxies to draw broader conclusions.

The findings point to the inner dusty torus as the main source of infrared light, refining how we model black hole feeding and the surrounding AGN structure.

New infrared measurements in the Circinus galaxy are reshaping how we understand the region closest to its supermassive black hole, with important consequences for accretion and feedback models in active galactic nuclei.

NASA’s Webb telescope uses Aperture-Mask Interferometry to produce high-contrast, high-resolution images of the Circinus galaxy’s center, focusing on the vicinity of the black hole.

The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered new evidence about Circinus’s supermassive black hole, which lies about 13 million light-years away.

The study provides unprecedented insight into the balance of inflowing material and outflows in the immediate vicinity of Circinus’s supermassive black hole.

Webb’s Aperture Masking Interferometer enables higher-contrast, higher-resolution infrared data, revealing dust structures near bright sources with images twice as sharp.

Observations from July 2024 and March 2025 delivered the sharpest view yet of a black hole’s surroundings, challenging previous ideas about infrared emission sources.

Researchers including Enrique Lopez-Rodríguez and Julien Girard note Circinus is a prototypical active galaxy, but broader sampling across different systems is required for general statements.

The work demonstrates Webb’s power to deepen understanding of black hole environments and to map feeding and emission processes across the universe.