Overview
- Researchers report that most near-infrared emission near Circinus’s core arises from the inner dusty torus feeding the supermassive black hole, not from outflows favored by earlier models.
- The observations used JWST’s NIRISS Aperture Masking Interferometer high-contrast mode to reconstruct a finely detailed image from interference patterns.
- NASA and the study team note this is the first extragalactic observation with Webb’s high-contrast interferometric mode and the sharpest view of the black hole’s immediate surroundings taken by Webb.
- The findings, published January 13, 2026 in Nature Communications, build on Hubble context and overcome ground-based limits caused by dust and bright starlight.
- The team plans follow-up targets to assemble a statistical sample of active galactic nuclei to test how typical Circinus’s feeding-dominated emission is.