Red Eyes: Cosmic Lens Reveals a Pair of Black Holes ⚡ экспресс
With the help of gravitational lensing of the cluster PLCKG004.5-10.5, scientists discovered an unusual pair of 'red dots' in a galaxy at z~7 – the Red Eyes. These are two very close (separated by only ~70 pc, which is less than the distance to many neighboring stars) faint objects, offset from the galaxy center by about one effective radius. Their own ultraviolet radiation is very weak, but thanks to the 20-fold lensing amplification, they became noticeable. It seems such off-center objects, possibly containing intermediate-mass black holes (10^4–10^6 M☉), may be common in early galaxies and participate in the growth of the central supermassive black hole through mergers.
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.