THIS is the sharpest image ever taken near a supermassive black hole – and it solves a huge mystery that’s baffled scientists since the ’90s.
Astronomers have long been stumped about clouds of hot gas coming from near a black hole that are so bright you can’t even see them clearly.
All they could make out was a blurry glow, which many believed was the black hole blowing “winds” of hot dust away from its centre.
But fresh research published by Nasa has thrown those theories out into space.
There are billions to trillions of supermassive black holes in the universe.
Using data and images from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope scientists have uncovered the truth within a supermassive black hole found in a galaxy known as Circinus.
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The Circinus Galaxy is located 13million light–years from Earth.
Instead of blowing this dust away a compact ring to feed on is formed.
This circles the black hole, like a teasing snack waiting to be eaten.
A special tool called an Aperture Masking Interferometer was used to finally see into Circinus.
This acts like a pair of high-tech sunglasses which filter out the blinding glow and allow scientists to see the hidden structure beneath.
The research was carried out by Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez from the University of South Carolina and published in the Nature journal.
What is a black hole? The key facts
Here’s what you need to know…
- A black hole is a region of space where absolutely nothing can escape
- That’s because they have extremely strong gravitational effects, which means once something goes into a black hole, it can’t come back out
- They get their name because even light can’t escape once it’s been sucked in – which is why a black hole is completely dark
What is an event horizon?
- There has to be a point at which you’re so close to a black hole you can’t escape
- Otherwise, literally everything in the universe would have been sucked into one
- The point at which you can no longer escape from a black hole’s gravitational pull is called the event horizon
- The event horizon varies between different black holes, depending on their mass and size
What is a singularity?
- The gravitational singularity is the very centre of a black hole
- It’s a one-dimensional point that contains an incredibly large mass in an infinitely small space
- At the singularity, space-time curves infinitely, and the gravitational pull is infinitely strong
- Conventional laws of physics stop applying at this point
How are black holes created?
- Most black holes are made when a supergiant star dies
- This happens when stars run out of fuel – like hydrogen – to burn, causing the star to collapse
- When this happens, gravity pulls the center of the star inwards quickly and collapses into a tiny ball
- It expands and contracts until one final collapse, causing part of the star to collapse inward thanks to gravity, and the rest of the star to explode outwards
- The remaining central ball is extremely dense, and if it’s especially dense, you get a black hole
