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A stunning new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows a nearby galaxy bursting with light at its center, revealing the distinct but optically invisible structure that underpins the sprawling realm.
Known as Messier 77, or the Squid Galaxy, it’s located in the constellation Cetus some 45 million light-years from Earth. Like our own Milky Way, it takes the form of a barred spiral galaxy, but its center is far more luminous. That’s because it’s dominated by an active galactic nucleus, a term that describes a supermassive black hole in the midst of a voracious feeding frenzy. At eight million times the mass of the Sun, the black hole is pulling matter towards itself, which begins to swirl around it like water circling a drain, and heating up in the process. That heat is so intense, and the amount of matter captured so enormous, that the light the black hole’s so-called accretion disk produces outshines the entire surrounding galaxy.
By contrast, our milky way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is nowhere near as attention-grabbing. While it’s also surrounded by an accretion disk, it isn’t devouring enough matter to be considered an active galactic nucleus.
🆕 Our ESA/Webb Picture of the Month catches a beacon of light in swirls of dust 🌀
The barred spiral galaxy Messier 77 (M77) lies 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus 🐋. This new image from Webb’s #MIRI highlights the galaxy’s piercingly bright core. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/2tHUwKDM0D — ESA Webb Telescope (@ESA_Webb) May 7, 2026
The new image, taken with Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, also reveals something invisible in optical wavelengths: the Squid Galaxy’s central bar. This is a distinctly straight region, packed with stars, that bisects the outer spiral arms. The Squid Galaxy’s bar is surrounded by a bright band called a starburst ring, where star formation is off the charts.
Feeding the black hole’s appetite and star formation alike is the galaxy’s preponderance of gas and dust, which the Webb’s MIRI instrument is well-suited to peer through. The cooler dust grains that fill out the galaxy beyond its luminous center are colored in blue.
The most striking feature in the image are bright orange lines that explode from the galaxy’s center. These are called diffraction spikes, and are a byproduct of the lens technique used to image the galaxy — not actual giant galactic spokes.
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