The powerful James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a phenomenon once thought impossible.
Astronomers trained the instrument on a number of galaxies in deep space, and at the center of one galaxy spotted a young, dwarf black hole triggering enormous outbursts of gas. Cosmic material traveling near a black hole can get pulled around these gravitationally powerful objects, and some of it gets eaten. But black holes are awfully messy eaters, leading to ejections of gas in potent "outflows." Yet this particular black hole, dubbed LID-568, is feeding ravenously on matter at a rate 40 times faster than thought possible.
"This black hole is having a feast," Julia Scharwächter, an astronomer at the International Gemini Observatory who coauthored the new research published in Nature Astronomy, said in a statement.
Scientists found this black hole has exceeded the "Eddington limit," which is basically the maximum brightness an object can achieve and how rapidly it can consume matter. Such a feat could be why astronomers are finding black holes, born early on, that are more massive than such a young object ought to be. (This black hole dwells in a galaxy born around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang -- which is means it's relatively young. The universe is some 13.8 billion years old.) It's possible that black holes may grow massive in a single bout of dramatic feeding.
"This extreme case shows that a fast-feeding mechanism above the Eddington limit is one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the Universe," Scharwächter explained.
Black holes are fascinating objects. They're unimaginably dense: If Earth was (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across. This profound density gives black holes phenomenal gravitational power. Famously, even light that falls in (meaning passing a boundary called the "event horizon") cannot escape.
To observe the extremely distant black hole LID-568, scientists employed the Webb telescope's Near InfraRed Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, to observe the faint but powerful light from gas emissions beaming from the black hole.
The investigation of LID-568, however, has just begun. Astronomers want to know how this black hole broke its Eddington limit, which means more viewing with 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 new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets -- be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.