It is believed that nearly every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its center, with a mass ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun. Black holes grow by consuming surrounding matter, but in the process they also eject powerful energy jets. These jets heat the surrounding gas, delaying the formation of new stars and affecting the growth of the galaxy as a whole.

This has long presented researchers with a puzzle. As a black hole emits jets and heats the surrounding gas, the gas that would otherwise be consumed by the black hole—that is, its energy source—is dispersed far away. And yet, why is it that black holes do not “run out of fuel” and instead continue to grow?

To explain this mystery, researchers proposed the following hypothesis: Gas blown away by the heat eventually cools in interstellar space and condenses into thin, thread-like structures called filaments. These filaments then fall back toward the black hole.

A newly published study has brought researchers closer to confirming this idea. An international team led by Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, a professor at the University of Montreal, observed the central galaxy NGC 4696 in the Centaurus Cluster and demonstrated a connection between such filaments and its central black hole. The observations achieved a resolution fine enough to distinguish structures only about 30 light-years across.

The team observed the galaxy's central region for approximately eight hours using the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). This allowed them to visualize the entire pathway for the first time, from gas being heated by the black hole, cooling into filaments, and then falling back towards it as “fuel.”