The James Webb Space Telescope has peered 13 billion years in the past and tens of billions of light-years away from our planet.And in a recent experiment, scientists decided to look deep into a black hole that's way closer to home where they were met with an explosive light show.AsCNNreports, scientists at Northwestern University turned the groundbreaking space telescope onto Sagittarius A*, the central black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy that's about 26,000 light-years away from Earth, to see what its sensitive instruments would pick up.In the most detailed look at that black hole ever undertaken, the astrophysicists observed incredible flares of light spewing out of Sagittarius A* that CNN described as resembling pyrotechnics.As the researchers explained in a new paper published inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters, these types of flares usually burst out of accretion disks, or swirling disks of hot gas and dust. Though they're not completely sure of its origin, the scientists behind this discovery say they think it came from an accretion disk located just beyond the black hole's event horizon a region with gravity so densethat even light can't escape."In our data, we saw constantly changing, bubbling brightness," Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern who was the study's lead author, told CNN. "And then boom! A big burst of brightness suddenly popped up. Then, it calmed down again."As Yusef-Zadeh acknowledges, these fantastic flares appear to be happening at random."We couldnt find a pattern in this activity," he said. "The activity profile of this black hole was new and exciting every time that we looked at it."Though they're effectively invisible, astronomers are able to "see" black holes because of their effect on the things around them. Anything that wanders too close to one gets sucked into its gravitational pull. Any dust and gas that gets pulled in starts to swirl super-fast in that maelstrom, forming accretion disks that heat up as they "feed" the black hole.While the mechanism that fuels black holes is pretty well understood, astrophysicists don't know exactly why these galaxy-powering bodies emit these bright, energetic flares. According to Yusef-Zadeh, the flares witnessed in Sagittarius A* are singular even for such mysterious motions."Flares are expected to happen in essentially all supermassive black holes, but our black hole is unique," he explained. "It is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state."Over a period of a year, the researchers watched Saggitarius A* in eight-to-ten-hour increments. During that time, as Yusef-Zadeh explained, "we noticed changes in every observation.""We saw something different each time," the scientist told CNN, "which is really remarkable."More on James Webb discoveries: Scientists Surprised to Realize Red Dots in James Webb Images Are Black HolesShare This Article