@interstellarspac: 🚨James Webb Just Captured a Galaxy That Looks Like Infinity. Located about 8.3 billion light-years from Earth, the system consists of two massive, ring-shaped galactic nuclei that astronomers believe were created by a nearly head-on collision between two disk galaxies. 🌌 But the shape isn’t the strangest part. Observations from JWST, Chandra, the Keck Observatory, and the Very Large Array revealed an actively feeding supermassive black hole located between the two galactic nuclei, embedded in an extended cloud of ionized gas. That’s unusual because supermassive black holes are normally associated with the central regions of galaxies. 💥 Astronomers propose that the collision compressed and shocked enormous amounts of gas between the galaxies. One possibility is that the dense gas underwent rapid gravitational collapse and formed the black hole directly, rather than first forming a star cluster or smaller black-hole seeds. This process is known as direct collapse. 🔭 Follow-up JWST observations strengthened this explanation. The black hole’s measured velocity is closely aligned with the surrounding gas, making alternative explanations—such as a black hole ejected from one of the galaxy nuclei—less likely. The observations also indicate that both galaxy nuclei contain active black holes, meaning the system may contain three actively feeding supermassive black holes. ⚠️ But scientists have not yet confirmed that the central black hole formed through direct collapse. The researchers describe it as a candidate, and further observations and modeling are needed to establish its origin. Research: van Dokkum et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters

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2026-09-17 00:11:08

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