There’s A Supermassive Black Hole Hiding In This James Webb Image

Almost all galaxies have these supermassive black holes at their center, but like other types of black holes, they can’t be observed directly. However, when looking at Stephan’s Quintet, the Webb scientists were able to study this black hole by looking at the gas around it. As gas moves around the supermassive black hole, it gets hot, and scientists were able to study it using Webb’s spectrography instruments. These work by taking the light from an object and breaking it down into different wavelengths. By seeing which wavelengths of light have been absorbed, scientists can work out what an object is made of.

In this case, they could see several key components in the gas around the black hole using Webb’s NIRSpec instrument: atomic hydrogen, which they could trace to see the structure of the gas moving away from the black hole, iron ions which point to the areas with the hottest gas, and molecular hydrogen, which is cold and dense and fuels the black hole. 

The researchers also used a spectrometer in the mid-infrared instrument, MIDI, to see how the gas around the black hole was being ionized by radiation from it, tracking the movement of gas both toward and away from the celestial body. “By using NIRSpec, scientists have gained unprecedented information about the black hole and its outflow,” Webb scientists write. “Studying these relatively nearby galaxies helps scientists better understand galaxy evolution in the much more distant universe.”