Every time we look up at the night sky,
we are looking back in time. The light
from distant stars has traveled for
thousands or even billions of years to
reach us. But even then, we are only
seeing part of the picture because there
are two great barriers to our view. The
first is swirling cosmic dust which
hides everything behind it. The second
is the steady expansion of space itself,
which stretches light beyond our visible
spectrum and into the infrared. For
centuries, these barriers have allowed
the universe to keep its deepest secrets
hidden. We've never seen the first
galaxies or witnessed the earlier stages
of stellar formation.
But on Christmas Day 2021,
all that changed.
We finally launched the so-called golden
eye that would allow us to lift these
cosmic veils forever. The James Webb
Space Telescope,
a 10 billion
three agency collaboration, web is the
most powerful observatory ever
constructed. Equipped with ultra
sensitive infrared detectors, it's not
only able to peer through the dust, it
can see even the faintest and most
distant objects. This telescope has
revolutionized how we see our universe.
We've seen wonders close to home,
auroras on Jupiter, and the iconic
pillars of creation and those further a
field. Gravitational shock waves and
galactic collisions to name a few. But
web wasn't just created to send back
pretty pictures. As of 2025, it has
already completed more than 860
scientific programs and collected nearly
550 terabytes of data. That's more data
than Hubble accumulated in 35 years.
These data sets are revealing a universe
far stranger and more complex than we
ever imagined. I'm Alex Mccoan and
you're watching Astramm. Join me today
as we take a look at some of James
Webb's most spectacular new images and
unravel cosmic mysteries from across the
depths of time.
Becoming fully operational in July 2022,
the James Webb Space Telescope was
designed for one primary mission, to use
its sensitive infrared detectors to
pierce the cosmic dust clouds that
permeate the universe, allowing us to
observe the very first stars and
galaxies, and it's off to a good start.
Already some of its early findings are
pushing the boundaries of what we
thought we knew, challenging current
models of how the universe has evolved.
But to look that far back, James Webb
has to peer through a lot of space. And
along the way, it's made some remarkable
discoveries around more familiar
objects, ones that are only visible at
infrared wavelengths. So, let's take a
trip across the cosmos and back through
time. Starting in our solar system and
traveling to astonishingly distant early
galaxies all through the incredible eyes
of web.
Our first stop is in our own cosmic
backyard, Neptune.
Whilst it's usually easily recognizable
thanks to its blue hue, with web it
looks rather different. Doesn't it look
ethereal?
The methane in Neptune's atmosphere
absorbs almost all of the infrared
component of sunlight, meaning very
little is reflected. There simply isn't
much for the James Web Space Telescope
to pick up, making much of the planet
appear dark. But this does have an
upside. Instead, it allows the subtle,
faint glow of Neptune's dusty rings and
high altitude clouds to stand out in
dramatic detail.
These are the clearest images we've ever
taken.
Not only beautiful, they've also
revealed previously unseen ring arcs and
shown us 14 of the ice giants known
moons. And this is just the start.
Scientists are still pouring over these
images to uncover more of Neptune's
secrets. I've already made a video on
some of them if you want to find out
more. But for now, the other secrets of
the outer planets will have to wait. as
web has been focusing its attention on
one of the most compelling objects
currently in our solar system. One that
didn't start its life here. On the 6th
of August 2025, WEB used its near
infrared spectrograph to join the fleet
of telescopes and spacecraft observing
the comet 3i atlas. Its main focus was
to analyze its composition. What Webb
found has opened up a Pandora's box of
possibilities. The comet turned out to
be unusually rich in carbon dioxide and
water vapor. In fact, the ratio was
amongst the highest ever observed in any
comet. It is a messenger from another
star system, having formed in a region
of its original stars planetary disc
where temperatures were cold enough for
CO2 ice to naturally freeze out. By
directly sampling the comet, James Webb
has proven that the basic building
blocks of planetary systems and life are
shared across the galaxy. The common
elements and chemical processes that
created our solar system are likely
universal. But this extraordinary
telescope hasn't just proven useful in
exploring worlds in our cosmic backyard.
It's also part of the hunt for new
worlds beyond our star. And yet again,
it's making some astonishing finds.
The search for exoplanets is well
underway. Thanks to missions like TESS,
the transiting exoplanet survey
satellite, and Hubble, we've already
found more than 6,000 of them. But
they've only been able to gather so much
information. To find out more about
these strange new worlds, they needed
another instrument. And that came in the
form of James Webb. It's found that our
closest star has been keeping secrets.
Just over four light years away lies the
Alpha Centuri system, a trio of stars
that includes two sunlike stars, Alpha
Century A and B, and the red dwarf
Proxima Centuri. For decades,
astronomers have suspected that planets
might orbit the two sunlike stars. But
the immense overlapping glare of the
binary pair made them impossible to
detect. Web has overcome this obstacle
using its mid infrared instrument and an
internal chronograph to block the
intense starlight. Much like you might
use a car's visor to block direct
sunlight so you can see on the road,
this device stops the bright starlight
and allows the faint light from the
planets around it to be seen. This is an
incredibly challenging observation,
requiring meticulous image processing to
subtract the residual light from both
Alpha Centuri A and his companion star
B. The resulting faint point of light
detected by Meri is now the closest ever
exoplanet candidate to be directly
imaged. It has given a strong evidence
of a potential Saturn mass gas giant
orbiting Alpha Centuri A. And even more
surprisingly, based on orbital
simulations, this gas giant likely
follows an elliptical path within the
stars habitable zone.
While the gas giant itself would not
likely host life as we know it, its
existence confirms that a planetary
system has formed around our nearest
stellar neighbor, providing the
potential for smaller habitable moons or
other terrestrial worlds yet to be
discovered.
Now, if planets and moons form
throughout the universe, which we very
much think is the case, the next
question is how? And this is once again
something the James Webb Space Telescope
can help answer. So let's continue our
journey by diving into the immense
chaotic processes of creation.
The cosmic cliffs, part of the Karina
Nebula, 7,600 light-years away, and the
iconic Pillars of Creation in the Eagle
Nebula, 6,500 light-years away, may be
familiar sights to some of you, thanks
to the stunning visible light images
captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
But web has given us an entirely
different view. Rather than competing,
Web acts as Hubble's companion, using
the infrared part of the light spectrum
to peer through the thick, obscuring
dust that Hubble's visible light can't
penetrate. In this image of the Pillars
of Creation, Web's near cam view reveals
thousands of previously unseen stars,
including newborns that were completely
hidden within the dark, dusty columns in
Hubble's images. They appear as bright
red orbs lying outside one of the dusty
pillars. Estimated to be just a few
hundred,000 years old. The red glow
comes from energetic hydrogen molecules
created in plasma jets and shock waves
emanating from the new star within. It's
as if the top of the pillar is pulsing
with activity.
Similar processes have also been seen as
the cosmic cliffs. Here, Web's near Cam
has captured crisp details of the
turbulent gaseous structure at the edge
of the nebula.
This sharper look reveals that they are
actively being sculpted and eroded by
intense radiation from massive young
stars just above them. A process much
harder to visualize in Hubble's previous
data. This new ability to peer inside
these cosmic nurseries fundamentally
changes our understanding of how stars
and planets are born. Finally allowing
us to put theories based on simulations
to the test. And what web is finding is
that infant stars are not calm. Their
births are explosive, energetic, and
always spectacular.
Deep in the outskirts of the Milky Way
in a region known as Sharpless 2284,
approximately 15,000 lighty years away,
our golden eye found something
extraordinary. A true beer of a protoar
weighing as much as 10 times the mass of
our sun. But not only that, this massive
star is unleashing huge jets of gas and
radiation
known as a bipolar outflow. They are
created as superheated gas falls inward
toward the protoar's core and then is
simultaneously blasted back into space.
Powerful magnetic fields channel this
material into narrow high velocity jets
launched outward at hundreds of
kilometers per second.
Spanning 8 lightyear, these spectacular
birth announcement jets are nearly
double the distance from our sun to the
Alpha Century system and are immensely
powerful, acting like a cosmic snow
plow, pushing away the surrounding
molecular cloud material and creating
two much larger opposing loes of gas.
This is a rare example of what's known
as a hair big harrow object. bright
patches of gas and dust that form when
these jets collide with surrounding
material.
Although over 300 hairrow objects have
been observed so far, these jets are
particularly rare due to their immense
size and strength. The stable
symmetrical nature of the outflow
suggests the star is forming via an
ordered disc which provides crucial
evidence for the core accretion model of
massive star birth. What makes this
discovery even more exciting is the fact
that it's located in a star cluster on
the far edge of the galaxy where
metallicity is extremely low. This means
it has far fewer heavier elements than
our sun. And by heavier elements, we
mean anything beyond hydrogen and
helium. This pristine environment almost
perfectly mirrors the conditions of the
early universe. By gazing through its
infrared lens, WEB is giving scientists
crucial clues to something that has long
been a mystery. How the very first
massive stars may have formed.
But Stellirth isn't the only part of the
creation process we don't fully
understand. Planetary formation is
equally mysterious and yet again
something that James Webb Space
Telescope is illuminating for us.
Once a young star settles, the chaos
around it begins to organize. The
remaining swirling dust and gas becomes
a protolanetary disc, the birthplace of
planets. As giant planets emerge within
these discs, they can form miniature
discs of their own. One example comes
from the CTH B system located 625
light-years away. This massive young
exoplanet is encircled by a
circumlanetary disc, a dense ring of
material considered a moon assembly
site. It's how we believe Jupiter's moon
system formed long ago.
Using its MIR instrument, Web delivered
the first direct measurements of the
chemical and physical properties of this
potential moon forming disc. Researchers
discovered that the disc is carbonri
containing complex organic molecules
like acetylene and benzene.
This finding represents a major
breakthrough as this carbonrich
chemistry is in stark contrast to the
disc surrounding the host star where
scientists detected water but virtually
no carbon. This chemical difference seen
in a system that has only been evolving
for 2 million years allows us to compare
the ingredients for forming moons in a
distant system to the formation of our
own solar system over 4 billion years
ago. The universe is busy making worlds
and web is giving us an unprecedented
front row seat. Now we've seen how
individual stars are born and how
planets begin to take shape. But these
stories don't happen in isolation. They
play out across the vast, breathtaking
structures of entire galaxies.
In 2024, web focused on 19 nearby spiral
galaxies, delivering images that are
simply astounding.
Forget the science for a moment and just
look at them.
If that isn't art, I don't know what is.
You are looking at the heart of cosmic
creation.
In a galaxy like NGC 628, also known as
the Phantom Galaxy or M74, located
approximately 32 million lighty years
away. Web's view is special because it
highlights specific galactic
ingredients. The blue light marks
millions of older established stars
clustered in the galaxy cores. But it's
the incredible red and orange that
demands attention. This is glowing dust
and gas, nursery material that threads
through the spiral arms like fiery
motorways. The bright red areas are
stars that haven't fully formed yet,
still encased within their dusty peaks.
You can also see that the spiral arms
are filled with giant spherical shells
or bubbles, massive holes carved out by
the shock waves from ancient exploded
stars.
Analyzing these consistent patterns
across 19 galaxies help scientists
understand how they build, maintain, and
distribute the material necessary for
stars, planets, and with that life.
But even now with all this information,
we still don't have the full picture. We
have one step further to go. Instead of
looking at fully formed old galaxies, we
need to know how and when they began.
For that, we need to go back much
further to the very first stars and
galaxies. It's time to travel back to
the cosmic dawn. some 13.5
billion years ago.
Even with the James Webb Space
Telescope, with all of its spectacular
technical advances, there are limits to
what light can show us. The earliest
light in the universe was released when
space first became transparent just a
few hundred,000 years after the Big
Bang. Beyond that point, the universe
cannot be observed with light. But
luckily, physics gives us ways to see
further than we otherwise could.
Gravitational lensing.
We see this effect when a galaxy cluster
like RXJ2129
located 3.2 billion lighty years away is
in the James Webb's view. This cluster
is so heavy that its gravity warps
spaceime, acting like a cosmic
magnifying glass that bends and focuses
the light from galaxies behind it. In
2023, Web captured a distant supernova
explosion behind RXJ29.
But the telescope didn't just see it
once. Its light was split, creating
multiple images of the same event.
Because the light from each image took a
slightly different magnified route
around the cluster, the supernova
appears as echoes across time. Analyzing
the time delay between each one, or how
much longer the light took along each
path, allows astronomers to precisely
measure vast cosmic distances. This data
is critical for refining the expansion
rate of the universe, also known as the
Hubble constant. There's been some
disagreement over this value in recent
years. You can watch my video on it
here. But who knows, maybe James Webb
can help solve it with measurements like
these.
And so, we have arrived at the very edge
of the observable universe, close to the
dawn of time. Here, web's near and
nearpec instruments as part of the jade
survey have pushed observation to its
limit. The challenge is that light from
the earliest galaxies is severely
affected by the cosmological red shift
phenomenon. This occurs because the
expansion of the universe stretches
light waves as they travel across vast
distances of space, shifting the light
from the visible spectrum all the way to
the infrared. exactly the kind of light
web is designed to capture.
It has uncovered galaxies that existed
far earlier and are far brighter than we
expected. And one in particular stood
out. Web's nearspec instrument confirmed
its red shift to be 14.32.
This galaxy, now named Jade's GSZ140,
is seen as it existed only 300 million
years after the Big Bang, making it one
of the earliest known galaxies in the
universe, beaten only by Z14, which
James Webb also spotted in May 2025 and
is 10 million years older. The
prevailing lambda cold dark matter
cosmological model predicts that
galaxies at this epoch, often referred
to as the cosmic dawn, should be small,
dim, and only just beginning to form
their first, simplest stars, which is
almost the opposite of this new
discovery. Jade's GSZ140
is too mature, too soon. To grow a
galaxy this large only 300 million years
after the Big Bang, the early universe
must have been forming stars far faster
and more efficiently than any current
model allows. The very existence of this
galaxy and several other similar sources
forces astronomers to confront the
possibility that the foundations of
modern cosmology need a serious
revision.
One explanation for this contradiction
revisits a bold idea first proposed in
2007 by cosmologists Katherine F, Paulo
Gondolo, and Douglas Spoiler. The
existence of dark stars. These
hypothetical fair stars are not powered
by nuclear fusion like our sun, but by
the gravitational annihilation of dark
matter particles within their cores.
These potential fair stars could grow
enormous, millions of times the mass of
the sun, cool and be longived, producing
the infrared light web specializes in.
So we could be looking at the signatures
of dark stars. This fundamentally
connects the most distant observations
to the least understood component of our
universe. So yes, the James Webb Space
Telescope has literally shed light on
our universe in a whole new way. It has
revealed a cosmos richer and more
complex than we ever dared to imagine. I
am super excited to see what James Webb
finds next. And with potentially more
than 20 years of functionality still on
the clock, there's surely a lot more to
come. Which of those images did you like
best? Let me know in the comments what
you want James Webb to look at next.
Just past Jupiter, a comet has been
randomly exploding for years, and no one
knows why.
These aren't cute little bursts. This is
believed to be the most active comet in
the solar system. We've seen it get
nearly 300 times brighter in just a
couple of hours, explode four times in 2
days without warning, and spew over a
million tons of debris out faster than
the speed of sound. And what makes it
even stranger is there's no obvious
trigger for the explosions. No dramatic
swing into the sun, just a peculiar icy
body acting unlike anything we've ever
studied.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join me today on a tour of
everything we know about Centaur 29P
and why we think it acts out so
violently and the recent discoveries of
the James Webb telescope that flipped
these assumptions on their head.
In 1927, two astronomers at Hamburg
Observatory, Arnold Schwasman and Arno
Arto Vakman, discovered Centaur 29P
while comparing a series of photographs
of the night sky. Initially classified
as a short period comet, 29P was later
reclassified as a centaur, the name
given to a group of small solar system
bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter
and Neptune.
They exhibit characteristics of both
comets and asteroids. Much like mythical
centaurs were half human, half horse,
it's thought that centaurs originated in
the Kyper belt, but eventually moved
inward due to the subtle gravitational
influences of the gas giants over the
last few million years. Centaurs
generally have elliptical and unstable
orbits. Most will eventually be flung
into the inner solar system as comets
join the Jupiter family comets or be
catapulted out of the solar system
entirely. Because of this, centaurs
represent a short-lived transitional
state in a small body's journey from the
Kyper belt to the Jupiter family comets.
We think Centaur 29P could be launched
into the inner solar system as early as
2038 when a conjunction with Jupiter
will change the path of its orbit.
But Centaur 29P is different from most
centaurs in two big ways that will be
relevant later. Firstly, its orbit isn't
elliptical. It traces an almost perfect
circle around the sun. And secondly, it
is big. Measuring 60 km in diameter, it
is wider than 96% of all centaurs and is
one of the largest known cometry bodies.
Oh, and it explodes a lot. It's the
second most active body in the solar
system after Io, exploding on average
about 30 times per year. And 40% of
these strong outbursts don't happen in
any kind of predictable fashion.
These explosions are erratic, sudden,
and very intense. Following an outburst,
the comet reaches peak brightness in
about 2 to 3 hours.
In 2024, it made headlines when it
erupted four times in a 48hour period,
appearing almost 300 times brighter than
normal. Two years earlier, it shot more
than 1 million tons of debris into space
faster than the speed of sound, like
popping the cork out of the world's most
pressurized champagne bottle. The main
outburst then triggered two smaller ones
5 and 7 days later, which seems to be a
common occurrence for the comet. And
even though those sound incredibly
violent and powerful, things get even
bigger.
In September 2021, Centaur 29P underwent
the largest outburst in 40 years when it
blew its top five times in a row.
Despite the massive blast, it wasn't
scientists who initially noticed. It was
amateur astronomers.
This is one of the curiosities of
Centaur 29P's history. Most of its
eruptions are first observed by hobbyist
stargazers.
It's easier to pull out your backyard
telescope and get approval to point a
multi-million dollar public funded
instrument on your special interest
randomly exploding centaur. When
scientists heard what had happened, they
managed to secure precious Hubble time
to take a closer look. But the universe
had other plans. As bad luck would have
it, the day before the scheduled
observation of Centaur 29P, Hubble
experienced a technical glitch and
couldn't be used.
So, what causes these outbursts? How do
we know about Centaur 29P's properties
that could possibly explain them? If you
suspect volcanoes, you're kind of right.
But not the hot, fiery kind. They are
ice volcanoes.
Centaur 29P is what we call a cryo
volcanic comet. These are generally
covered in an icy shell with ice, dust,
and gas inside. Mainly carbon dioxide,
carbon monoxide, and nitrogen gases in a
frozen icy state. Over time, radiation
causes the crust to weaken from solid to
gas. This forces internal pressure to
rise. Eventually, it gets too much and
the outer shell cracks, unleashing a
visceral eruption of cryomagma from the
inside of the comet. A mix of frozen
water, ammonia, salts, and volatile
gases like methane and nitrogen gas.
See, ice volcano
cent's nucleus has a high escape
velocity, and most debris isn't ejected
fast enough to break free from it.
gravity. The result is most falls back
onto the centaur's surface to reform its
crust. This may then trigger the
knock-on outbursts five or so days
later, as we saw in the 2021 outburst.
Around the comet nucleus, the ejected
dust and ice particles form a hazy
reflective cloud, lingering for days up
to a couple of weeks, making the comet
look brighter, sometimes by several
orders of magnitude. Some cryovcanic
comets, like 12p, also known as the
devil comet for the hornlike plumes that
form during its outbursts, are on highly
elliptical orbits around the sun. As you
might expect, the closer to the sun they
get, the more active and volatile their
behavior becomes. But Centaur 29P is on
a circular, not an elliptical orbit.
It's always roughly the same distance
from the sun. So, you'd expect a pretty
even absorption of solar radiation and
regular predictable activity. However,
as we've seen, that's not the case at
all. So, why are these eruptions so
erratic when they shouldn't be? What's
going on here? Scientists have been
trying to work out if there is any
method to the madness of the centaur's
eruptions for years. Some have
speculated that the eruptions may be
related to its slow rotation period of
57 days. More specifically, they
observed that major outbursts were more
likely to happen every 52 to 60 days.
But smaller outburst events also
occurred every 30 and every 90 days with
enough regularity to make scientists
think that there might be some kind of
seasonal cycle governing the comet.
While Centaur 29P's eruptions seem to
happen quasi periodically, they are
utterly unpredictable in terms of
intensity or precise timing.
That didn't stop astronomers from trying
to anticipate when our feisty friend
would blow. In April 2023,
scientists noticed the light surrounding
the comet's nucleus had become fainter
than ever, suggesting a slowed rate of
outgassing. They predicted pressure was
building up inside the nucleus at a
faster and faster rate, making an
eruption highly likely. And just like
that, Centaur 29P gave off a mini
outburst later that very same day. It
was the first successful prediction of
an eruption on this weird and volatile
little world. For the first time, we
weren't just reacting to randomness. We
got on the inside track. It felt like a
breakthrough. And thanks to James Webb,
we were about to have another.
Until recently, we had never detected
carbon dioxide on Centaur 29P. Carbon
monoxide was always seen as the driver
of these eruptions, mainly because it is
consistently found in high amounts
around the comet. But in 2024, data from
the James Web Space Telescope showed us
that that was only half the answer. Data
from the previous radio wavelength
observations of Centaur 29P showed a
carbon monoxide gas jet pointed towards
Earth. But web's near infrared
spectrograph brought the jet's
composition into greater focus,
revealing not just one but two jets of
carbon monoxide. One pointing to Earth
and one pointing towards the north. And
that wasn't all. The James Web Space
Telescope also revealed two jets of
carbon dioxide emanating from the north
and south directions. The first
definitive detection of the gas on the
comet. The difference in abundance of
carbon monoxide and dioxide suggests
Centaur 29P might not be one object, but
several objects that have become stuck
together.
The cause of the outgassing itself?
Well, scientists still can't say for
sure, but one interesting theory has
been put forth to explain the unusually
high carbon monoxide levels associated
with Centaur 29P.
Carbon monoxide is extremely volatile,
and pure carbon monoxide ice can
sublimate at temperatures as low as 25
Kelvin. If it were stored near the
centaur's surface, it would have all
escaped a long time ago. So, it must
instead be trapped or preserved deep
below the surface somehow. One possible
solution is amorphous water ice. Almost
all the ice we know of on Earth is in
crystalline form. Crystalline ice is
characterized by a structured ordered
arrangement of molecules. Amorphous ice
on the other hand is not tightly packed.
This makes it less dense than
crystalline ice and it also means it can
hold gases within its structure.
At temperatures above 77 Kelvin,
amorphous ice turns spontaneously into
crystalline ice. The higher the
temperature, the faster this conversion
occurs. In this process, trapped gases
are released. So in theory, if Centaur
29P still has amorphous ice in its core
along with trapped carbon monoxide and
that ice is undergoing conversion into
crystalline form, then that could be
where the high levels of carbon monoxide
are coming from.
How plausible is this theory? Let's
break it down. Cent 29P started in the
Kyper belt with temperatures ranging
from 30 to 40 Kelvin. At this
temperature, all ice would be amorphous
since it only starts crystallizing above
77 Kelvin. As it traveled inward over 10
million years to its current location at
six astronomical units from the sun,
temperatures rose to 115 Kelvin and its
amorphous ice started converting to
crystalline ice. But how long will it
take for all of its amorphous ice to
turn crystalline? I mentioned earlier
that centur 29P size was going to play a
role. Remember this is that part.
First researchers took four known small
centaurs. They all measured between 1
and 6 km across and were in a similar
orbital position to centaur 29P. They
calculated that it would take those
centaurs between 0.1 to 6 million years
to convert their amorphous ice into
crystalline ice. In other words, by the
time they arrive in this position, they
are already fully crystalline inside.
All trapped gases released. No aces up
their sleeves. Predictable behavior.
However, a centaur the size of 29P would
take between 60 and 100 million years to
convert all its amorphous ice. If these
calculations are correct, it is possible
the centaur has only converted 50 to 65%
of its amorphous ice. And this has huge
implications for its behavior.
Converting lower density amorphous ice
into higher density crystalline ice
would shrink the overall volume of the
nucleus. This could induce structural
failures in the central surface and
interior. Some believe the subsequent
cave-ins, landslides, and sinkhole
creation events could be the driving
forces behind the Centaur's erratic
outbursts. But regardless of the elegant
explanation, another problem exists.
Centaur 29P doesn't slowly leak gas. It
erupts explosively, sometimes multiple
times per year. How that pressure is
able to build up fast enough to elicit
several explosions back to back in quick
succession is still not fully
understood.
Why Centaur 29P undergoes such bursts of
brightness and how its outgassing
actually works remain two of the biggest
areas of investigation relating to this
highly active cosmic body. It challenges
our assumptions of just how fiery icy
bodies can be in the outer solar system.
And we still don't know as much about it
as we'd like. But we've made progress.
We're slowly starting to unravel its
mysteries. And thanks to incredible
tools like the James Webb Space
Telescope, we're only going to keep
learning.
Picture
this. It's the year 2500. The first
probe to leave the Milky Way is finally
passing our galaxy's outermost star. A
historic moment is being broadcast to
every settled planet. The prob's name is
Wonderlust One. Its destination, our
closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.
But just as onlookers celebrate,
something strange happens.
Impact.
Worlds watch in shock as the middle of
the probe crumples in on itself, causing
its metal to distort, buckle, tear, some
vanishing entirely. The remains of the
probe start spinning in space. Its
systems dead. And then the culprit
becomes clear.
Wonderust one was hit by a primordial
black hole.
Of course, what I just told you is
fiction. But tiny black holes with
masses so small they are comparable to
an adult rhino might not be. They could
be out there circling our galaxy's
edges. and we may have just found proof
that they actually exist.
I'm Alex Mccoan and you're watching
Astramm. Join with me as we delve into
the darkness to solve the mysteries of
primordial black holes. What are they?
Where do they come from? And should we
be worried?
For a long time, tiny black holes, what
I'm going to call black hole rhinos,
seeing as they could have around the
same mass, were thought to be
impossible. Until the 1960s, we knew of
exactly one way to make a black hole,
and that was through stellar collapse. A
star 20 times the mass of our sun or
greater running out of fuel and
exploding in a supernova.
All that exploded matter collapses,
leaving behind an object so dense, not
even light could escape from its
crushing gravity.
This is a black hole. And because it
formed from a star, it's a stellar black
hole. But this isn't how all stars end.
If their mass is less than 20 times that
of the sun, it still goes supernova, but
the collapse isn't quite powerful enough
to create a black hole. Instead, we see
a neutron star, a tiny celestial object
that's still incredibly dense and made
up almost entirely of neutrons. And for
stars smaller than eight stellar masses,
they don't go supernova at all.
So there is a limit to how big stellar
black holes can be at birth. No larger
than the largest stars. Maybe a few
hundred times the mass of our sun and no
smaller than a few times more massive.
So why do we think that smaller than
possible black holes could actually
exist?
Strangely, the answer is that we
discovered bigger than possible ones.
Today we know that at the heart of
almost every large galaxy lies a
gargantuan monster, a super massive
black hole. Back in the 60s, we were
just beginning to discover these
enormous beasts. The first quazar, a
highly luminous and redshifted galactic
center, was found in 1963, kickstarting
a roughly decadel long golden age of
black hole research. The first
predictions of a massive black hole at
the center of a galaxy came in 1971.
As the years passed and more evidence of
these titans came to light, we realized
they were mindbogglingly massive,
hundreds of thousands to billions of
times the mass of our sun. But they are
something of an enigma and left
scientists with one question in
particular.
How do they form?
While it's technically possible that a
stellar black hole could consume mass
and eventually grow this big, this
explanation started to break down as
examples of super massive black holes
from earlier and earlier in the
universe's history started showing up in
our increasingly distant images of the
cosmos. But for now, at least, there
wasn't a better explanation.
Then came the James Webb Space
Telescope,
launched on the 25th of December, 2021
and switched on in 2022. It promised to
see further and in better detail than
any telescope had ever seen before. It
would look for stars so distant, their
light had started traveling at almost
the dawn of the universe. And James Webb
did not disappoint.
These little red dots represent galaxies
with super massive black holes from just
500 million years after the Big Bang.
Scientists realized this was not enough
time for stellar black holes to grow to
that size. Not without devouring matter
faster than the laws of physics should
allow. Now, I've made a video on this
idea before, and there is some evidence
that this can happen, that black holes
can disregard our speed limits on how
fast they can eat to grow at rates we
wouldn't initially have thought
possible. That is, if we hadn't seen
them doing it, but there are plenty of
scientists who are skeptical of this
answer. And there's an alternative
theory, one that another recent James
Web discovery may have just confirmed as
true.
When it comes to forming a black hole,
the key is density. When density is high
enough, mass becomes so compact that its
localized field of gravity passes a
tipping point. And the speed at which
you would have to move to get away from
it becomes impossibly fast. I.e. you'd
have to travel faster than the speed of
light. The question is, how does matter
get that dense in the first place?
For that, you need a huge amount of
energy, enough to overcome the
electromagnetic force that stops
electrons or protons from getting too
close to each other. Then there's the
neutron degeneracy pressure, a quantum
mechanical force that says that two
subatomic particles, two neutrons, can't
occupy the same space at once. Neutron
stars are not dense enough for their
gravity to overcome this pressure. But
they are still so dense that a spoonful
of this matter would weigh as much as
Mount Everest. Over 900 billion kg.
To make a black hole, you need forces
able to crush the whole of Mount Everest
into that teaspoon and then some. In
fact, Mount Everest would have to be
squashed into a space more than 1,000
times smaller than an atom to become a
black hole. In the universe, as it
exists today, such forces only exist in
very specific circumstances inside
collapsing stars as they turn supernova.
But go back in time, and that wasn't
always so.
Let's rewind to the earliest moments of
the universe. Within the first second
after the big bang there, those
pressures did exist, albeit just for a
moment. In this hot, dense particle
soup, the distribution of matter was not
completely homogeneous or evenly
distributed. There were areas of high
particle density and others where it was
lower. Scientists believe it's possible
that in particularly dense patches of
space, black holes could have formed
from primordial matter itself, skipping
the star phase entirely.
The result is called primordial black
holes. And surprisingly, they aren't
actually a new idea. They were first
predicted in 1966 by Yakov Zeldovich and
Igor Noikov. What's interesting about
them is that they could have formed with
masses 100,000 times greater than that
of our sun. This would be more than
enough to account for the super massive
black holes that we see today,
especially given the billions of years
they've had to grow.
Curiously, they didn't have to form as
giants. They could also have been much
smaller. a black hole the size of a
single atom with mass comparable to an
asteroid or a so-called black hole rhino
that would be no bigger than a proton
but the mass of a rhinoceros.
However, this was 13.8 billion years
ago. And there are two problems with the
theory that such tiny black holes exist
today. The first is Hawking radiation.
An extremely long wavelength of
radiation that Steven Hawking
hypothesized black holes emit gradually
shrinking them over vast time frames. It
essentially tells us that by now all
tiny black holes should have evaporated
away. The second problem is that we
haven't proven that primordial black
holes actually existed in the first
place. We've never seen a black hole
arise out of the interstellar dust, or
at least we hadn't until recently.
In July 2025, NASA reported that the
James Web Space Telescope had seen two
early disc galaxies, likely in the
process of crashing into each other. But
strangely between them and not in the
center of a galaxy of its own was a
super massive black hole. It had not
somehow been ejected from either galaxy.
They also have their own super massive
black holes which left this third one
completely inexplicable.
The team who found it proposed that the
black hole formed in situ via the direct
collapse of a gas cloud. But this isn't
the only evidence that black holes can
simply appear given the right
conditions. QS01
is a super massive black hole that was
also spotted by web. It inhabits a
surprisingly small galaxy. Scientists
were able to do spectral analysis and
found that it's incredibly low in heavy
metals, elements other than hydrogen and
helium. This galaxy had less than 1% of
the oxygen that we see in our own and
researchers called it one of the most
chemically unevolved systems found in
the early universe which is telling.
Stars usually produce these elements in
just their first few generations. So the
fact that they are absent in QSO1's
galaxy suggests that very little stellar
formation has taken place yet.
compelling evidence that wherever QS01
had come from, it had likely not been
birthed by a star.
Now, although not smoking guns, these
two examples lend weight to the idea
that the early universe was capable of
producing primordial black holes. In
fact, this finding may explain where all
super massive black holes came from. And
if that's true, then it's almost certain
that super tiny black holes used to
exist, too. But they're all gone, right?
By now, they should have dissolved.
Well, according to one theory, perhaps
not.
Astronomy has a problem on its hands. As
we track the amount of gravitational
pole in the universe, it is much higher
than it should be. Scientists conclude
that there is additional matter inside
galaxies or circling them in large
halos. Something they've dubbed dark
matter because we can't see it. But you
know what else carries serious mass and
is quite hard to see? Black holes,
particularly ones with no accretion
discs because they formed directly out
of interstellar matter. Of course,
scientists have investigated this idea,
and there's no evidence of large black
holes surrounding the Milky Way.
Thankfully, if there were, stars would
go flying like bowling pins every time
one fell into our galaxy. We'd also see
the light from stars behind them
behaving strangely through the power of
gravitational lensing, as the intense
gravity of these black holes distorts
the space around them. And we simply
don't see anything that matches up to
this. But tiny black holes, our black
hole rhinos, would be very hard to
detect through either means. There's no
proof they are not there. The only
argument is to say that they would have
all dissolved by now. But this might not
be the case.
In April 2024, a study published in the
monthly notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society found that at tiny
levels, Hawking radiation might slow
down considerably, almost stopping
entirely, which means these black holes
might shrink and shrink until they
eventually stop. which if true means
that black hole rhinos might be out
there.
Many believe dark matter circles our
galaxy in a massive halo. What if
instead of all of that it was tiny black
hole rhinos?
There could be millions and millions of
them out there. A black hole minefield
lying invisible and deadly. a swarm we
could someday encounter if we ever
attempted to leave the galaxy to explore
another. We might be caged here without
knowing it.
Of course, space exploration has plenty
of dangers all of its own. But it's more
than unsettling to consider that as we
voyage out into the dark, we could be on
a collision course with a tiny
microscopic black hole with the mass of
a rhino. or that one could be hurtling
through space on its way towards us.
Let's hope we find some evidence that
this particular theory isn't true, or at
least forget the idea of leaving the
galaxy. I think I'd rather stay at home.
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