The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has provided the first direct measurements of the chemical and physical properties of a potential moon-forming disc encircling a large exoplanet. The carbon-rich disc surrounding the world called CT Cha B, which is located 625 light years away from Earth, is a possible construction yard for moons, although no moons are detected in the Webb data. The disc offers insight into how the moons of Solar System gas giants like Jupiter might have formed.
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. They come in dramatically different sizes. Stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have collapsed under their own gravity, typically weighing between three and a few dozen times the mass of our Sun and compressed into a region just kilometres across. Supermassive black holes, by contrast, are the giants lurking at the centres of galaxies, weighing millions to billions of solar masses. These beasts didn't form from a single collapsing star but grew over billions of years through gas accretion and mergers with other black holes.
