Webb peers into the Milky Way's heart and finds the black hole's dinner is rich in stardust

At the centre of our galaxy sits Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole four million times the Sun's mass — and, by black-hole standards, a strangely picky eater. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Nicole Ford and colleagues at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute in Canada measured the hot gas spiralling around it and found it rich in what astronomers call metals — carbon, oxygen, iron and the other elements forged in stars and scattered when those stars exploded. The gas closely matches the chemistry of the stars orbiting nearby, suggesting they were born from the same material. The findings, in The Astronomical Journal, help explain how the ingredients that eventually built planets — and us — gather around a galaxy's heart.