James Webb Spots Strange Structure at Core of Distant Galaxy

A stunning new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows a nearby galaxy bursting with light at its center, revealing the distinct but optically invisible structure that underpins the sprawling realm.

Known as Messier 77, or the Squid Galaxy, it’s located in the constellation Cetus some 45 million light-years from Earth. Like our own Milky Way, it takes the form of a barred spiral galaxy, but its center is far more luminous. That’s because it’s dominated by an active galactic nucleus, a term that describes a supermassive black hole in the midst of a voracious feeding frenzy. At eight million times the mass of the Sun, the black hole is pulling matter towards itself, which begins to swirl around it like water circling a drain, and heating up in the process. That heat is so intense, and the amount of matter captured so enormous, that the light the black hole’s so-called accretion disk produces outshines the entire surrounding galaxy. 

By contrast, our milky way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is nowhere near as attention-grabbing. While it’s also surrounded by an accretion disk, it isn’t devouring enough matter to be considered an active galactic nucleus.

The new image, taken with Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, also reveals something invisible in optical wavelengths: the Squid Galaxy’s central bar. This is a distinctly straight region, packed with stars, that bisects the outer spiral arms. The Squid Galaxy’s bar is surrounded by a bright band called a starburst ring, where star formation is off the charts.

Feeding the black hole’s appetite and star formation alike is the galaxy’s preponderance of gas and dust, which the Webb’s MIRI instrument is well-suited to peer through. The cooler dust grains that fill out the galaxy beyond its luminous center are colored in blue.

The most striking feature in the image are bright orange lines that explode from the galaxy’s center. These are called diffraction spikes, and are a byproduct of the lens technique used to image the galaxy — not actual giant galactic spokes.

Because the Squid Galaxy is relatively close by for a major galaxy — the closest is the Andromeda galaxy at two million light years away, though a number of smaller dwarf galaxies are just tens of thousands of light years away — and because we can see it face-on, it’s one the best studied cosmic realms out there.

But it still packs a few mysteries. Astronomers remain puzzled why its black hole barely seems to emit any gamma rays, for instance, which is typically a reliable telltale of these cosmic objects — but does emit an unusually high amount of “ghost particles” called neutrinos.

More on space: NASA Says Strange Red Dots in Sky Are an Unknown Class of Object That Looks Like a Huge Evil Eye

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