NASA’s Webb telescope reveals a massive merger of galaxies around black hole ‘Monster’.

Now that we have a powerful lens that’s always aimed at the deepest regions of the universe, our definition of “surprise” when it comes to astronomy images has changed slightly. It really isn’t “surprising” anymore when NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals a brilliant, ancient piece of the cosmos. At this point we know to expect nothing less from the pioneering machine.

Instead, whenever it sends back a stunning space image, it seems to evoke more of a “JWST strikes again!” Feeling. But every time, our jaws drop, and rightly so.

Anyway, that kind of dissonant version of “surprise” has happened again – to a rather extreme degree. Last week, scientists presented the brilliant JWST view of a cluster of galaxies merging around a massive black hole harboring a rare quasar – also known as an impossibly bright beam of light emanating from the chaotic center of the void.

There’s a lot going on here, I know. But the team behind the find believes it could escalate further.

“We think something dramatic is going to happen in these systems,” Andrey Vayner, a Johns Hopkins astronomer and co-author of a study on the scene that will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. For now, you can check out a detailed overview of the discovery in an article published on arXiv.

What is particularly fascinating about this portrait is that the present quasar is considered an “extreme red” quasar, meaning that it is very distant from us and therefore physically rooted in a primitive region of space near the beginning of time falls.

Basically because it lasts time In order for light to travel through space, every stream of cosmic light that reaches our eyes and our machines is seen as it was long ago. Even moonlight takes about 1.3 seconds to reach Earth. So if we look up at the moon, we see it 1.3 seconds in the past.

More specifically, scientists believe that this quasar took about 11.5 billion years for the object’s light to reach Earth, meaning we’re seeing it as it was 11.5 billion years ago. This also makes it one of the most powerful of its kind observed from such a gigantic distance (that is, 11.5 billion light-years away), according to the team.

“The galaxy is at this perfect moment in its life and is about to change and look completely different in a few billion years,” Vayner said of the realm hosting the quasar.

Analysis of a galactic rarity

In the colorful image created by Vayner and other researchers, we’re looking at several things.

On the left is a Hubble Space Telescope view of the region surveyed by the team, and in the middle is a magnified version of where the JWST was targeting. Take a look at the far right of this image, where four individually color-coded boxes are visible, and you’ll analyze various aspects of the JWST data, broken down by velocity.

For example, red stuff moves away from us and blue stuff moves toward us.

This classification shows us how each of the galaxies involved in the spectacular merger behaves — including the one containing the extreme black hole and accompanying red quasar, which is actually the only one NASA’s multibillion-dollar team has discovered expected tool.

“What you’re seeing here is just a small subset of what’s in the dataset,” Nadia L. Zakamska, a Johns Hopkins astrophysicist and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “There’s just too much going on here so we highlighted first what really is the biggest surprise. Every blob here is a baby galaxy merging with this mother galaxy and the colors have different speeds and it’s all moving in extremely complicated ways.”

Now, Zakamska says, the team will start untangling the moves and improving our vision even further. However, we’re already looking at information that’s far more incredible than the team initially anticipated. Hubble and the Gemini North Telescope previously showed the possibility of a transitional galaxy, but definitely didn’t hint at the swarm, which we can see with JWST’s amazing infrared equipment.

“In previous images, we thought we saw evidence that the galaxy might be interacting with other galaxies on the way to the merger, because their shapes are being distorted in the process,” Zakamska said. “But after we got the Webb data, I was like, ‘I have no idea what we’re even looking at here, what is all this!’ We spent several weeks just staring and staring at these images.”

It soon became clear that the JWST showed us at least three separate galaxies that were moving incredibly fast, the team said. In fact, they believe it may mark one of the densest known regions of galaxy formation in the early Universe.

Everything about this complex picture is fascinating. We’ve seen the black hole that Zakamska calls a “monster,” an extremely rare ray of light ejected from that black hole, and a host of galaxies on a collision course — all seen as they were billions of years in the past.

So dare I say it? The JWST strikes again, offering us a most valuable cosmic vignette. Cue, jaw.