3 Galaxies Spinning Around ‘Something’ at High Speed!

The James Webb Space Telescope, which started its activities in the summer of 2022, shook the world in July with its first observations. While the telescope has been a tool for many observations and new discoveries, a new one has been added to these discoveries today.

Scientists had the chance to observe the red quasar named “SDSS J165202.64+172852.3”, which is among the first 13 targets viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope. The image, taken by Webb and then processed with filters, revealed important details about the quasar.

James Webb’s image that enables new discoveries:

Click to view in full size. (44.80MB)

The image you see above shows a cluster of galaxies merging around a rare quasar inside a “monstrous” black hole. The quasar in question was already among the candidates considered by astronomers to have a supermassive black hole.

The colors we see in the cluster of galaxies actually tell us different things. The green color indicates that the galaxies are not in motion (from our point of view), while the red segments represent galaxies moving away from Earth at 700 kilometers per second, and the blue segments are approaching galaxies at 350 kilometers per second from Earth.

The image above, which is the clearest photograph ever taken from this region, revealed another important information. Scientists have now seen at least three galaxies in this region orbiting something at very high speed. But what makes the galaxies spin around is still a mystery. Of course, if the theory is correct, it could be a supermassive black hole.