The Webb telescope finds a strange galaxy in the deepest realms of space

The James Webb Space Telescope allows astronomers to see huge numbers of galaxies in deep space, and they’re finding some peculiar things.

Notably, scientists recently trained the Webb telescope – the most powerful observatory in space – on as many as 100,000 relatively young galaxies and observed some unique cosmic phenomena in a galaxy dubbed CEERS 1019. It is extremely young, for a cosmic object, to exist only some 570 million years after the big bang(opens in a new tab) created the universe. And it contains the most distant supermassive black hole ever found.

Even though this black hole — an object with such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape — is billions of light-years away, the Webb Telescope’s ability to capture extremely weak energy allows researchers to see what’s going on. in CEERS 1019.

“Looking at this distant object with this telescope is like looking at data from black holes that exist in galaxies close to our own,” Rebecca Larson, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who led the discovery, said in a statement.(opens in a new tab).

CEERS 1019 and its black hole are unique for a number of reasons:

– It may not be just one galaxy: Most galaxies appear as a singular disk. Not CEERS 1019. As the picture below shows, it is made up of three bright tufts. “We’re not used to seeing so much structure in images at these distances,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York who worked on the research. The structures could be galaxies merging together and fueling the creation of stars. “A merger of galaxies could be partly responsible for fueling activity in this galaxy’s black hole, and could also lead to more star formation,” added Kartaltepe.

– Unusual black hole: “CEERS 1019 is not only notable for how long ago it existed, but also for how relatively light its black hole weighs,” NASA explains. It weighs 9 million times more than the sun, that is Very, but not compared to the giants often found at the center of galaxies in the young universe, which are 1 billion times (or more!) heavier. Also, astronomers still don’t know how such a powerful object exists. It appeared so early in the universe, when the first galaxies were forming. With the help of the Webb telescope, researchers hope to understand how such a large galaxy and other massive objects came to be.

– Voracious eater: What is clear, however, is that the black hole found in CEERS 1019 is extremely active. “Though small, CEERS 1019 is ravenous, consuming gas, dust and stars at the highest rate theoretically possible for its size,” explains the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the observatory’s science mission. “Webb’s Specter(opens in a new tab) reflects that he is fully focused on eating his ‘meal.’” (By peering into distant light, Webb’s specialized instruments can visualize the chemical composition of objects billions of light-years away. this black hole, but we know how black holes behave and can determine what is happening at such great distances by observing the activity of atoms or molecules in the deep cosmos.)

A graph showing how the James Webb Space Telescope observed the behavior of gas in the CEERS 1019 galaxy, illustrating the behavior of an exceptionally busy black hole.
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Leah Hustak (STScI)

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These results(opens in a new tab) will be published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal The letters from the astrophysicist diary. And expect more discoveries from this vast survey of 100,000 galaxies.

“CEERS 1019 may hold this record for only a few weeks — claims about other, more distant black holes identified by Webb are currently under careful review by the astronomical community,” NASA said.

The powerful capabilities of the Webb telescope

The Webb Telescope – a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency – is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal unprecedented insights into the early universe. But it’s also peering into intriguing planets in our galaxy and even planets in our solar system.

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Here’s how Webb is achieving unprecedented feats and likely will for decades:

• Giant mirror: Webb’s light-catching mirror is more than 21 feet wide. It is over two and a half times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant and ancient objects. As described above, the telescope is peering into stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

  “We will see the very first stars and galaxies that have ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

• Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which sees mostly light visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see much more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths(opens in a new tab) compared to visible light, so light waves glide more efficiently through cosmic clouds; light doesn’t collide as often and isn’t scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate places Hubble cannot.

  “Lift the veil,” Creighton said.

• Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope it carries specialized equipment called spectrometers(opens in a new tab) that will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. The tools can decipher which molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, whether they are gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will examine exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we will find?

  “We may learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian(opens in a new tab)he told Mashable in 2021.

  Astronomers have already successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and the observatory has begun observing one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the Earth-sized rocky planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.