Black holes are misunderstood.
They’re almost inconceivably dense objects, which grants them immense gravitational power. (If Earth was hypothetically crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across.) Not even light can escape, if it falls in. But black holes aren’t incessantly sucking up everything in space like a vacuum cleaner (if so, we’d likely be in one). Things have to pass nearby to be affected. The black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, for example, isn’t eating much.
Yet 23 million light-years from us, the colossal black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 4258 is ravenously eating. The powerful James Webb Space Telescope snapped an image of this galactic event, which you see below.
“At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active,” the European Space Agency, which built the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, said in a statement.
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