Water can survive surprisingly close to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, James Webb Space Telescope finds (space.com)

The heart of the Milky Way may be more hospitable to water than astronomers thought. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers detected water and cosmic dust around an aging star only 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The new study suggests that water and dust can form and survive surprisingly close to a supermassive black hole, where intense radiation and other harsh conditions might otherwise be expected to destroy them. The team used Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to study IRS 3, an aging star located in the crowded environment surrounding Sgr A*, which has a mass of about 4 million suns, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). "Galactic centres are among the most extreme environments, so understanding whether stars can continue enriching their surroundings there is an important question," Florian Peißker, lead author of the study from the University of Cologne in Germany, said in the statement. "With Webb, we can directly observe how stars behave under these conditions and see that dust production remains remarkably resilient." IRS 3 — one of the brightest mid-infrared sources in the galactic center — is an...