All articles tagged with #squid galaxy
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a breathtaking image of Messier 77 (the Squid Galaxy), highlighting a bright core and radiating light beams. The glow is powered by gas heated by a central black hole; some rays are optical artifacts of the telescope. M77 sits about 47 million light-years away in Cetus and has a magnitude around 9.6, making it visible with modest telescopes.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures Messier 77, the Squid Galaxy, in infrared to reveal its blazing central active galactic nucleus powered by an 8‑million‑solar‑mass black hole, plus a hidden straight central bar bisecting the spiral arms and a bright starburst ring fed by gas and dust. The edge-on–like, dust-veiled core shines through in MIRI imagery, while diffraction spikes are instrument effects. At about 45 million light-years away, this nearby galaxy offers rich detail and ongoing puzzles, including a surprisingly weak gamma‑ray signal but notable neutrino activity.
NASA's JWST infrared view of the nearby Squid Galaxy (M77/NGC 1068) uncovers a hidden central bar of stars, gas, and dust and tracks gas motions around a core mass of ~13 million solar masses—possibly a tight binary of supermassive black holes. The images also reveal a bright starburst ring and other star-forming regions along the spiral arms, and the galaxy has been linked to a high-energy neutrino detected in 2022, hinting it could be a giant particle accelerator. JWST can't resolve the black holes directly but will illuminate the nucleus's dynamics.