Black holes are misunderstood.
They're almost inconceivably dense objects, which grants them immense gravitational power. (If Earth was hypothetically crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across.) Not even light can escape, if it falls in. But black holes aren't incessantly sucking up everything in space like a vacuum cleaner (if so, we'd likely be in one). Things have to pass nearby to be affected. The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, for example, isn't eating much.
Yet 23 million light-years from us, the colossal black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 4258 is ravenously eating. The powerful James Webb Space Telescope snapped an image of this galactic event, which you see below.
"At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active," the European Space Agency, which built the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, said in a statement.
Although black holes themselves don't emit light, the blazing hot material around them does. Most stuff in a black hole's orbit gets shredded apart and spins rapidly around the black hole, forming a super-hot, donut-like "accretion disk." As this cosmic dust and gas relentlessly spins around, it shoots light and energy into space. Importantly, some of this cosmic material can also rapidly plummet down into the black hole, where it travels at extreme speeds, heating up and producing glowing light.
That's the vivid glow you see at the center of the spiral galaxy below. And amid the light, you can see innumerable little pinpoints of light, each a distant star.
Clearly, this supermassive black hole is ingesting lots of cosmic cuisine. But once this glowing material passes the final boundary between space and the black hole, called the "event horizon," no more light is emitted. It's passed the point of no return.
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Also clearly visible in the galaxy, an object also known as "Messier 106," are two sprawling green outflows, which are made of hot gas. "They are likely caused by outflowing material produced by the violent churning of gas around the black hole, creating a phenomenon analogous to a wave crashing up out of the ocean when it hits a rock near the shore," the space agency explained.
The spiraling reddish-orange regions are similar to the dust and star-filled spirals of our own Milky Way galaxy. Out here, our sun and solar system lie far from the galactic center on one of the Milky Way arms. "We live in the suburbs of our galaxy," explains NASA.
The Webb telescope is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it's also peering at intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
