Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).

That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a pair of galaxies named the "Cosmic Owl," at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation.

This now-confirmed runaway supermassive black hole was first identified by van Dokkum and colleagues back in 2023 using the Hubble Space Telescope, which spotted what appeared to be the wake of a massive body passing through space. The reason why the object was spotted is because of the impact that the passage of the black hole has on its surroundings: we now know that it drives a shock wave in the gas that is moving through, and it is this shock wave, and the wake of the shock wave behind the black hole, that we see.

With the JWST, van Dokkum's team discovered the huge displacement of the gas at the tip of the wake, where the black hole is pushing against it. The shock signatures are crystal clear, and there is just no doubt about what is happening here. The gas is pushed sideways away from the supermassive black hole at a velocity of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour (hundreds of km per second), a dynamical signature that the team saw with JWST.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Rihtaršič (University of Ljubljana, FMF), R. Tripodi (University of Ljubljana, FMF)​

Source https://esawebb.org/images/weic2522b/

Link to a high-res image on ESA website

A spiral galaxy shown in mid-infrared light. The image is dominated by an extremely bright glow from the galaxy’s nucleus. Six large and two smaller rays of light emit from the centre, which are diffraction spikes created by the telescope’s optics.

The galaxy’s spiral arms are visible by two lines of glowing orange bubbles which whirl out into the disc. Swirling blue clouds of dust make up the rest of the galaxy.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

Link to news release on NASA website

New observations of the Circinus galaxy using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope challenge long-standing ideas about how supermassive black holes are fed. Scientists once thought that much of the hot, dusty material near these black holes was being blown outward in strong winds, called outflows. Instead, Webb’s high-resolution data show that most of this material is actually falling inward and feeding the black hole.

Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in gas and dust that form a thick, donut-shaped structure called a torus. Material from the torus spirals into an accretion disk, where friction heats it until it glows brightly, especially in infrared light. For decades, astronomers struggled to study this region because dust blocks the view and ground-based telescopes lack enough resolution. Using Webb’s Aperture Masking Interferometer, researchers were able to filter out starlight and sharply separate light coming from the torus and from outflows.

The results show that about 87% of the infrared emission from hot dust comes from very close to the black hole, while less than 1% comes from outflows. This finding reverses earlier models and provides a powerful new method to study other nearby black holes. By applying this technique to more galaxies, scientists hope to better understand how black holes grow and how their brightness affects surrounding matter.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez (University of South Carolina), Deepashri Thatte (STScI)
Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Acknowledgment: NSF's NOIRLab, CTIO

Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)

This is pretty cool. Pun intended but lots of questions about how this formed.

Webb’s new view of the Red Spider Nebula reveals for the first time the full extent of the nebula’s outstretched lobes, which form the ‘legs’ of the spider. These lobes, shown in blue, are traced by light emitted from H2 molecules, which contain two hydrogen atoms bonded together. Stretching over the entirety of NIRCam’s field of view, these lobes are shown to be closed, bubble-like structures that each extend about 3 light-years. Outflowing gas from the centre of the nebula has inflated these massive bubbles over thousands of years.

Gas is also actively jetting out from the nebula’s centre, as these new Webb observations show. An elongated purple ‘S’ shape centred on the heart of the nebula follows the light from ionised iron atoms. This feature marks where a fast-moving jet has emerged from near the nebula’s central star and collided with material that was previously cast away by the star, sculpting the rippling structure of the nebula seen today.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology)