Red Eyes: Cosmic Lens Reveals a Pair of Black Holes ⚡ экспресс
In VENUS survey data (JWST) behind the cluster PLCKG004.5-10.5, a pair of faint red objects ('Red Eyes') was discovered in a strongly lensed galaxy at z~7. The objects are spatially resolved in the image plane and have different colors; the critical curve lies far to the north, which confidently indicates two distinct objects. In the source plane, they are separated by about 70 pc with amplification μ~20; this also explains the second image to the northwest. The host galaxy is a typical star-forming one with M_UV,int ~ -19, whereas the intrinsic UV emission of the Red Eyes is very weak (M_UV,int ≳ -16), and they are off-center, at a distance of about one effective radius. Without lensing, the system would look like an ordinary galaxy at z~7 with no signs of LRDs. The results indicate that multiple off-center LRDs, similar to the Red Eyes, may be hiding in typical high-z galaxies. Among possible scenarios is the formation of intermediate-mass black holes (10^4–10^6 M☉) in stellar clusters on the disk, with subsequent mergers to grow the central supermassive black hole.
Thanks to gravitational lens — an effect predicted by Fritz Zwicky, where a galaxy cluster acts like a magnifying glass — the James Webb Space Telescope spotted two red dots in a galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang. These objects, dubbed the Red Eyes, turned out not to be in the center, as one might expect, but on the very outskirts — like a pair of glowing pupils peering into the void.
Each eye is an intermediate-mass black hole, surrounded by scorching gas. They are separated by just 70 parsecs — on cosmic scales, that’s tighter than our distance to the Milky Way’s center. The finding upends the idea of black hole growth: perhaps the supermassive monsters in galaxy cores are assembled from many such wandering "pupils" that merged and devoured matter on the fringes. In other words, every giant started out as a pair of red eyes.
🎯 The pair of Red Eyes is separated by 70 parsecs — nearly 30 times less than the distance from us to the Galactic Center. For black holes, that's an extremely tight proximity.