One of the biggest mysteries that scientists are eager to solve.; HOW MUCH DOES a black hole weigh? Fortunately, this is just one of the many things that the James Webb Space Telescope is about to discover.
After the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are released in a few days, it will be time for the observatory to begin doing real science. Webb's first goal will be to assist astronomers in "weighing" the supermassive black hole at the centre of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 4151, also known as the Eye of Sauron due to its resemblance to an iconic malevolent presence in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) will measure how quickly the innermost stars in the NGC 4151 galaxy orbit the galaxy's centre. Because the faster the stars orbit, the more massive the black hole is, this information will aid astrophysicists in calculating its mass.
NIRSpec will have to see the stars' light against the overwhelmingly bright background of the black hole's accretion disc in order to track them. As matter falls toward the black hole, it heats up and becomes brighter; an actively "feeding" black hole, such as the one in Sauron's pupil, which is one of the brightest things in the universe. It's difficult to distinguish mere starlight against that blazing background, but Webb's vision is sharp enough for the job.
Because NGC 4151 is so far away (about 19 megaparsecs), even Webb's powerful instruments won't be able to track individual stars. NIRSpec will instead follow "blurred together groups of stars and their combined motions.
principal investigator Misty Bentz, of Georgia State University, told inverse that She and her team are building a computer model in which tens of thousands of simulated stars orbit a supermassive black hole at their centre. They’ll change the mass of the black hole in the model until the simulated stars’ orbits closely match the real-world data from Webb.
GC 4151’s black hole is an active one, still growing by pulling more material into itself. And a black hole’s mass determines how it “feeds” on surrounding gas, how it affects nearby star formation, and thus how the whole galaxy evolves around it.
studying active black holes is so important, and NGC 4151 is one of the closest galaxies with an actively growing supermassive black hole at its centre. Astronomers nicknamed the galaxy the Eye of Sauron because its central region looks like the baleful eye of the evil ruler of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s easiest to notice in false-colour images, where radio emissions from clumps of hydrogen gas stand out in fiery red. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Webb will bravely look Sauron in the eye with its NIRSpec instrument, which is about the size of a shoebox but contains nearly 100 precisely crafted mirrors. Those mirrors capture light from every source in an image and then split the light into the individual wavelengths that make it up. That spectrum of wavelengths holds information about an object’s chemical composition, as well as how it moves relative to the telescope. With a single image, NIRSpec can produce about 1,000 spectra.
Bentz and her team stated that “We are hoping that the JWST data will provide a marked improvement over data that we can collect with ground-based observatories like Gemini, and if that is true, then there are some other galaxies that we would like to study in the same way as NGC 4151”.
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