Hanae Inami

At the center of galaxy VV 340a lies a supermassive black hole — an object with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape it. It emits a relativistic jet: a narrow stream of matter accelerated to near-light speeds.

The kitchen of a distant galaxy isn't limited to its bright disk. Around every star system, there's an invisible cloud of gas, like steam above a pot of soup. Astronomers peeked into this steam around galaxies that appear as they were just one and a half billion years after the Big Bang.

The Universe at 700 million years old was a noisy construction site, just beginning to light up. Telescopes caught a signal from that distant epoch: the galaxy REBELS-25, massive and full of stellar fuel.

In the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster lives the galaxy NGC 1275. From its core blows a wind of superheated gas — astronomers have now seen it in detail for the first time. The wind shows up in the glow of hydrogen and oxygen. It accelerates to 570 kilometers per second — faster than a bullet.