Today, even the most massive of the known black holes represent only about 0.1% of the stellar mass of the galaxy: just one-thousandth of the amount of mass found by summing up all the stars in the galactic environment surrounding it. For a long time, astronomers have wondered just how these supermassive black holes came to be: did they form from earlier generations of stars, or was something else needed to explain them? With a large suite of new data now available owing to the advent of JWST, the answer now seems certain: stars, alone, can’t explain these black holes. Here’s the evidence that leads us to that conclusion.
JWST reveals the Ring Nebula like never before
All stars eventually exhaust their nuclear fuel, running out of fusible material. The Egg Nebula, as imaged here by Hubble, is a preplanetary nebula,…