Webb Telescope captures image of massive black hole devouring matter

Black holes are misunderstood.

A black hole is an object with an almost inconceivable density, and therefore an enormous gravitational force. (If the Earth were to be crushed by a black hole, it would be less than an inch in diameter.) If you were to fall into it, not even light could escape. But black holes aren’t constantly sucking up everything in the universe like a vacuum cleaner (if they did, we’d be inside a vacuum cleaner). To be affected, an object must pass nearby. For example, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn’t gobble up very much.

But the massive black hole at the center of NGC 4258, a spiral galaxy 23 million light-years away from us, continues to feed voraciously. The powerful James Webb Space Telescope captured this galactic event in an image that you can see below.

“Like most spiral galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole at its centre, but this one is particularly active,” the European Space Agency, which built the telescope in collaboration with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, said in a statement.

While black holes themselves don’t emit light, the fiery hot material around them does. Most of the material in orbit around a black hole is shattered into pieces and spins around the black hole at high speeds, forming a super-hot, doughnut-like “accretion disk.” As this cosmic dust and gas spins relentlessly, it releases light and energy into space. Importantly, some of this cosmic material can also fall out rapidly. Into a black holeThere it moves at lightning speed, heats up, and emits a brilliant light.

It’s a brilliant glow seen at the center of the spiral galaxy below, and within that glow are countless tiny specks of light that are distant stars.

Clearly, this supermassive black hole is gobbling down copious amounts of cosmic food, but once this glowing matter passes the event horizon — the final boundary between the universe and the black hole — light stops being emitted — it has passed the point of no return.

The central core of galaxy NGC 4258 emits a bright, vivid light as material falls into the supermassive black hole at its center.
Credit: ESA Webb / NASA / CSA / J. Glenn

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The galaxy also contains an object known as Messier 106, which clearly shows two widespread green outflows of hot gas. “These are thought to be the result of outflowing material caused by the violent churning of gas around the black hole, crashing against rocks near the shore, creating a phenomenon similar to ocean waves,” the space agency explained.

The swirling reddish-orange region resembles the dust- and star-filled spirals of our own Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun and solar system are located in one of the Milky Way’s arms, far from the galactic center. “We live on the outskirts of our galaxy,” NASA explains.

The Webb Telescope’s Powerful Capabilities

The Webb Telescope was designed to peer into the deepest depths of space and reveal new insights about the early universe, but it also looks at planets and moons in our solar system, as well as other intriguing planets in our galaxy.

Here’s how Webb achieved this unparalleled feat and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.

– Giant Mirror: Webb’s mirror will capture light, but it’s more than 21 feet in diameter, more than 2.5 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. By capturing more light, Webb can see more distant and ancient objects. As mentioned above, the telescope will peer into stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. “We’ll be looking at the first stars and galaxies that formed in history,” Gene Clayton, an astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

– Infrared view: While the Hubble Telescope primarily sees light that is visible to our eyes, the Webb Telescope is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see a much wider range of the universe. Because infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light, light waves pass through cosmic clouds more efficiently; the light doesn’t collide with and get scattered as often by these dense particles. Ultimately, the Webb Telescope’s infrared vision can reach places the Hubble Telescope can’t.

“It lifts the veil,” Clayton said.

– Peeking into distant exoplanets: Webb Telescope It is equipped with a special instrument called a spectrometer. This instrument will revolutionize our understanding of these far-away worlds. It will be able to decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) are present in the atmospheres of far-away exoplanets, including gas giants and small rocky planets. Webb will be observing exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?

“We may learn things we’ve never thought of before,” Mercedes Lopez Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.

Astronomers have already managed to discover intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have begun searching for Earth-sized rocky planets in the TRAPPIST solar system, one of the most promising places in the universe.