Black holes are very important for galactic formation.

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Astronomers have discovered that the supermassive black holes in the centers of early galaxies are much more massive than expected. These surprisingly hefty black holes offer new insights into the origins of all supermassive black holes, as well as the earliest stages of their host galaxy’s lives.

In nearby, mature galaxies like our Milky Way, the total mass of stars vastly outweighs the mass of the big black hole found at the galaxy’s center by about 1,000 to 1. In the newfound distant galaxies, however, that mass difference drops to 100 or 10 to 1, and even to 1 to 1, meaning the black hole can equal the combined mass of its host galaxy’s stars.

This picture of unexpectedly massive black holes in fledgling galaxies comes from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s latest flagship observatory. Until JWST, which launched in late 2021, astronomers were generally limited in their studies of distant black holes to stupendously bright quasars, composed of monster, matter-devouring black holes that completely outshine the stars in their host galaxies.

NASA scientists have identified unexpectedly massive clouds of cold gas within the spiral galaxy NGC 4,945, located 13 million light-years away.

As per the release, the revelation of this cold gas serves as the discovery of a “galactic fossil.”

The observations suggest that the gas likely rushed through this galaxy following the outburst from its supermassive black hole some five million years ago.

Scientists have found a star unlike any other one recorded—which may change our understanding of how stars die.

This unusual star, 13,000 light-years away, has an elemental makeup that suggests it was formed in the aftermath of a more massive star exploding in a way that no existing theory seems to explain. According to everything else we know, the original star should have turned into a black hole instead.

The discovery may rearrange our picture of how stars explode and how some of the heavier elements are made. It also helps us better understand what the first generation of stars in the universe may have looked like.

How is a black hole formed? In the simplest language, a black hole is born when a star dies. Now, astronomers have claimed that they might have just witnessed the birth of such a black hole in a major first. This is huge for the scientific community worldwide as it directly links the death of a star to the formation of a black hole-like compact object.

“Our research is like solving a puzzle by gathering all possible evidence,” Ping Chen, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and lead author of a study published in Nature, was quoted as saying by Cosomos Magazine.

It started with the discovery of a super bright object in space, called SN 2022jli. The object, located some 76 million years away, was discovered by a South African amateur astronomer, Berto Monard. Soon it was confirmed that they had their eyes set on a supernova. A supernova occurs just as a star is breathing its last, or when a black hole is about to form.

Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions.

The name was suggested by the 5-year-old daughter of one of the researchers in the group and is due to the diffuse appearance of the object. Its surface brightness is to faint that it had passed unnoticed in the various previous surveys of this part of the sky due to the object’s diffuse appearance as if it were some kind of ghost. This is because its stars are so spread out in such a large volume that “Nube” (Spanish for “Cloud”) was almost undetectable.

This newly discovered galaxy has a set of specific properties which distinguish it from previously known objects. The research team estimate that Nube is a dwarf galaxy 10 times fainter than others of its type, but also 10 times more extended than other objects with a comparable number of stars.