JWST imaged spiral galaxy and area around its supermassive black hole! #space #astronomy #science

Indexé : 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]You're not going to believe me and you're going to say it's CGI, but behind me is a real photo of space taken by the most powerful telescope in space. What is that? This is Messier 77 or M77. It's a barred spiral galaxy just like the Milky Way with these huge arms of dust and gas and stars. Except we don't have any photos of the Milky Way like that.

[00:00:18]It's impossible. We just have illustrations like this based on what we can see because we're inside of it.

[00:00:23]Obviously something's going on in the middle and it took 45 million years for that light to reach us. This is caused by a super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy that's 8 million times more massive than our sun, which doesn't seem to make sense, right? Cuz it's so bright. But the black hole is so massive that all of the gas at the center of the galaxy is being pulled into its orbit and it's spinning and it's speeding up and it's crashing into each other and it's getting really, really hot and that is what's so bright, not the black hole itself, which is black. Or I guess it's nothing. There's no light. But it's so bright and so concentrated that it makes these diffraction spikes, which are JWST's signature. six big lines because JWST's mirrors are hexagonal. Other telescopes have other signatures. And in this view you can really see all of these orange spots are where stars are like really forming. But that's crazy.