The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the farthest supermassive black hole yet — a space vortex so far from home, it’s in one of the first galaxies of the universe.
Black holes were little more than a theory 50 years ago — a kooky mathematical answer to a physics problem — but even astronomers at the top of their field weren’t entirely convinced they existed.
Today, not only are supermassive black holes accepted science, they’re getting their pictures taken by a collection of enormous, synced-up radio dishes on Earth. Webb, the leading infrared space observatory, is also doing its part to reveal how these mysterious behemoths form in the first place. The finding was recently published in the journal Nature and highlighted by NASA during its Black Hole Week campaign.
He found a Milky Way black hole 50 years ago, and finally got to see it
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