On Oct 19, 2026, James Webb revealed the gas swirling around Sagittarius A* is laced with iron, carbon and even gold — yet our galaxy's 4-million-sun black hole barely feeds. Why is it starving amid a feast?
The Oct 19, 2026 announcement from McGill's Trottier Space Institute: JWST found gas near Sagittarius A* rich in heavy elements, including carbon, oxygen, iron and gold.
A fuller look at the finding: the metals change how gas cools, which may explain why Sgr A* eats so little compared to other supermassive black holes.
The 4-million-solar-mass object anchoring the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years away. Stars whip around it at thousands of kilometers per second.
In 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope unveiled the first picture of our galaxy's black hole — a glowing ring of superheated gas around a dark shadow.
Millions to billions of times the Sun's mass, lurking at the heart of nearly every large galaxy. How they grow is still debated.
Gold isn't made in ordinary stars. It takes the violent rapid neutron capture of colliding neutron stars to build the heaviest elements.
In 2017 scientists watched two neutron stars merge and saw the glow of freshly forged heavy elements — direct evidence of where cosmic gold comes from.