A new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope has shed new light on one of the Universe’s most luminous views.
Nicknamed the Squid Galaxy, Messier 77 (M77)’s swirling tentacles of dust and gas stretch into intergalactic space.
But what’s so striking about the galaxy – sitting 47 million light-years from Earth – is the beams of light shining from its centre.
The new image reveals how active this galactic nucleus is, Dr Darren Baskill, astronomy lecturer at the University of Sussex, told BBC Science Focus: “Just look how bright the centre of this galaxy is compared to the trillion stars that surround it.”
He explained: “For many years, what made the centre of such galaxies so bright was a mystery, until calculations and observations showed that the only explanation for such powerful objects could be vast amounts of gas falling into a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.”
And ‘supermassive’ doesn’t quite cover just how massive this is. Measuring eight million solar masses, M77 is twice as massive as Sagittarius A* – the one at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
But there’s another key difference, Baskill said. “A vast amount of gas is falling in a disk towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of M77, whereas at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, all is quiet, with only the occasional star falling into our supermassive black hole.
“And that is what explains the dramatic difference in brightness between our galaxy and M77.”
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