In the news

James Webb Telescope - Early Image (July 2022)

NASA has released the first full-color picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, shown below on the left. The image is the most detailed and deepest infrared view of the Universe yet seen, and shows a cluster of galaxies around 4.6 billion light years from us. The telescope is designed make observations of the very first stars to shine in the Universe, at a distance of over 13.5 billion light years from Earth. Another task is to probe the light from distant planets to see if they are habitable by providing data on the chemistry of their atmospheres. Using infrared instead of visible light allows the telescope to see through the gas and dust that often obscures objects in space, especially objects such as stars and galaxies as they form. This is shown very clearly when comparing images from the James Webb and Hubble telescopes of the same part of the sky:

First dormant black hole found outside the Milky Way

(July 2022)

A dormant black hole has been found outside of our Milky Way galaxy for the first time. Although other candidates have been proposed the new discovery is said to be the first for which the evidence is “unambiguous”. The black hole, which has been given the name VFTS243, is in an orbital dance with its companion star. However, and somewhat unusually compared to most black holes so far detected, it isn’t “feeding”, hence being dormant. In most cases a black is detected because it emits high levels of X-ray radiation as it attracts material towards, around and into it. This makes non-feeding black holes especially difficult to detect even though astronomers believe them to be quite common.