Overview
- An international team reported Tuesday that JWST plus a natural gravitational lens let them measure the mass of a quiescent black hole in galaxy MRG-M0138 at more than ten billion light-years, finding about six billion times the Sun’s mass.
- The mass came from stellar motions seen in JWST infrared spectra magnified roughly 30-fold by the galaxy cluster MACS J0138.0–2155, a method that reaches about 15 times farther than prior dynamical weighings.
- A separate study using high-resolution ALMA maps and archival Chandra X-rays identifies a cavity of cold molecular gas within roughly three light-years of Sagittarius A* that matches bright X-ray emission, which the authors interpret as a hot wind displacing or strongly heating the cold gas.
- Both results carry important caveats: the distant mass relies on complex lens models that add uncertainty, and the Milky Way wind appears asymmetric and influenced by local gas clouds, so deeper, higher-resolution follow-up is needed to map flows and confirm energetics.
- Taken together, the papers expand the toolkit for studying inactive black holes and strengthen the idea that long-lived, low-power winds or past luminous phases can remove or heat star-forming gas and help shut down star formation in galaxies.