Black holes are misunderstood.
Their density is almost unbelievable, which gives them an enormous gravitational pull. (If the Earth were hypothetically crushed into a black hole, it would be less than an inch in diameter.) If it fell into a black hole, not even light could escape. ), we might be in one of them). Things must pass nearby to be affected. For example, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way doesn’t eat much.
However, the giant black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 4258, 23 million light-years away, is greedily devouring us. The powerful James Webb Space Telescope captured images of this galactic event, shown below.
“Like most spiral galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its core, 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.
NASA scientists view the first Voyager images. What he saw made him shudder.
Although black holes themselves don’t emit light, the hot material around them does. Most of the material in the black hole’s orbit will be shredded and rapidly rotate around the black hole, forming a super-hot donut-shaped “accretion disk.” As cosmic dust and gas swirl, it emits light and energy into space. Importantly, some cosmic matter also falls rapidly into a black holeit travels at extremely fast speeds, heats up and produces light.
This is the vivid glow you see at the center of the spiral galaxy below. In the light, you can see countless small points of light, each one a distant star.
Apparently, this supermassive black hole is devouring a lot of cosmic delicacies. But once this luminescent material passes through the final boundary between space and the black hole, known as the event horizon, it no longer emits light. It has reached the point of no return.
Mix and match speed of light
The core of galaxy NGC 4258 is producing bright and vivid light as matter falls into the central supermassive black hole.
Image credit: ESA Webb/NASA/CSA/J. Glenn
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Also clearly visible in the Milky Way, an object also known as Messier 106 is two spreading green outflows composed of hot gas. “They are likely caused by outflowing material from the violent churning of gas around the black hole, creating a phenomenon similar to the waves that rush out of the ocean when they hit rocks near the coast,” NASA explained.
The spiraling red-orange regions resemble our Milky Way’s dusty and star-filled spirals. Here, our sun and solar system lie in one of the galactic arms away from the center of the galaxy. “We live on the outskirts of the Milky Way,” NASA explains.
The power of the Webb telescope
The Webb telescope is designed to peer into the deepest reaches of the universe and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it’s also looking at interesting planets in our galaxy, as well as planets and moons in our solar system.
Here’s how Weber accomplished his unparalleled feat, and will likely do so in the coming decades:
– Giant mirror: Weber’s mirror captures light and is over 21 feet in diameter. That’s more than two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant and older objects. As mentioned above, this telescope is observing stars and galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. “We’re going to see the first stars and galaxies forming,” astronomer Jean Creighton, director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which primarily observes light that we can see, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it observes light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see more of the universe. Infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves can pass through cosmic clouds more efficiently; the light doesn’t constantly collide with these tightly packed particles and be scattered. Eventually, Webb’s infrared vision could penetrate places Hubble couldn’t.
“It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.
– Gaze at distant exoplanets: Webb telescope Carry specialized equipment called a spectrometer This will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. These instruments can decipher the molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) present in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets—whether they are gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb observes exoplanets in the Milky Way. Who knows what we might find?
“We might learn something we never thought of,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.
Astronomers have successfully discovered interesting chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have begun observing one of the most exciting places in the universe: the Earth-sized rocky planets in the Trappist solar system.
