JWST Reveals Filament Recycling That Feeds Supermassive Black Holes
New JWST observations of NGC 4696 show an 800-light-year rotating gas disk fed by filaments that cool and funnel gas toward the central black hole; magnetic fields transfer angular momentum, enabling accretion, while the disk’s wobble shifts jets to heat gas more evenly, illustrating a self-sustaining cosmic recycling that lets black holes keep growing and may occur in other clusters.