Scientists have long believed that huge supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of all large galaxies. That means the failure to detect such a cosmic giant at the heart of the Southern Pinwheel, also known as Messier 83 (M83), has been a major enigma. And now, with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists appear to have discovered a long-lost black hole.
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Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers may have solved this mystery, finding the first evidence of a lost supermassive black hole at the center of M83 — also known as NGC 5236 — a spiral galaxy about 15 million light-years away. Supermassive black holes have masses millions or billions of times that of the Sun. They are found at the centers of distant galaxies and are particularly visible when they are actively feeding, surrounded by gas and dust that they heat, causing them to emit intense light.
These regions, known as "active galactic nuclei" or AGNs, are often visible even in galaxies that are otherwise too distant or too faint to detect.
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This has led scientists to hypothesize either that the supermassive black hole at the center of M83 is inactive (not actively feeding on matter), or that the active galactic nucleus that feeds it is hidden under a dense veil of dust.
This second explanation is supported by new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which takes full advantage of the $10 billion space telescope's unparalleled sensitivity and spatial resolution. Clumps of highly ionized gas have been identified as the "unwavering evidence" that suggests the presence of a cloaked active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the heart of M83.
Even the explosive deaths of massive stars via supernovae wouldn't provide enough energy to create the signature signal detected by JWST, so an AGN is considered the most likely culprit — but not the only one.
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The research team behind this discovery must now rule out other possible mechanisms for creating the highly ionized neon gas, such as shock waves traveling through the gases between stars — the so-called "interstellar medium."
Source: livescience
