NASA James Webb Space Telescope is the “perfect time machine”, will reveal secrets of black holes
The NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is about to start its spectacular journey of space exploration. As the world awaits the first images captured by the most powerful space telescope to ever exist, there are already different missions planned for the JWST. A group of scientists will be looking at the high star-density areas to get a better idea of how these celestial bodies interact. Another, and a very interesting mission the Webb Space Telescope will be undertaking would be to observe and reveal more information around black holes, and particularly the supermassive black holes. And why? It’s because scientists believe this could be our window to the origin of the universe. Also read: James Webb Space Telescope hit by an asteroid! Will it survive?
Recently, the Event Horizon Telescope captured a historic image of Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), a supermassive black hole that resides right at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. While the image is a blurry and pixelated orange halo like structure, it has excited scientists beyond belief because a black hole of this size hiding in plain sight within a galaxy is a very rare phenomena. And now, the JWST, with its more powerful lenses, can take much clearer images of it to help scientists learn more about the black hole.
The discovery of the black hole has however raised more questions than it has answered. And the biggest puzzle is around its age. Also read: NASA to launch 3 rockets from private Australian space port
“An intriguing recent finding has been the discovery of hyper-massive black holes, with masses of several billion solar masses, already in place when the universe was only about 700 million years old — a small fraction of its current age
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