A fountain shoots from the center of the city at a speed thousands of times faster than a courier bike. Such a 'fountain'—a stream of gas accelerated to 5500 kilometers per second — has been spotted by astronomers in the galaxy GLIMPSED-329380. It is so far away that its light took 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the universe was just 800 million years old.
At the heart of this galaxy lies an active black hole — an object that pulls in matter and flings some of it back into space. The James Webb Space Telescope split the galaxy's light into colors, like a prism splitting light into a rainbow. In this spectrum, astronomers saw lines of oxygen and hydrogen, smeared by the enormous speed of the flow. It turned out that the ejected gas carries dust — tiny solid particles that usually settle on the outskirts of galaxies.
Despite such power, the flow barely hinders the birth of new stars. Astronomers measured how much material is being carried away from the galaxy, and it turns out to be less than a tenth of what falls onto the black hole. This means the galaxy manages to accumulate gas for new stars even while the black hole 'exhales' part of its reserves.
The galaxy itself resembles the 'little red dots'—mysterious objects that the Webb telescope finds in the early universe. It has the same reddish color, the same spectral lines, and the same shape of glow. This is the first direct evidence that black holes, not something else, are indeed at work inside such dots.
as written by the authors arXiv:2604.08687
We report the discovery of GLIMPSED-329380, a z=6.64 galaxy behind Abell S1063, which shows signs of an extreme ionised outflow driven by an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The deep JWST/NIRSpec medium grating observations show spatially resolved structures of a host galaxy containing the very fast outflow and an AGN, which we analyse separately. The outflow, mainly traced by broad [O III]{\lambda}5008 and H{\alpha} emissions in the host, reaches a full-width half-maximum velocity of ~5500km/s, velocities only observed in AGN-dominated systems. From the Balmer decrement, we observe that while the narrow emission lines show no dust attenuation, the outflowing gas is dusty. We use emission lines diagnostics to infer gas abundances within the host galaxy. The oxygen abundance is 12+log(O/H) ~ 7.95 (~18% solar) and the host is slightly nitrogen-enriched with log(N/O) ~ -0.75. Despite its extreme velocity, the mass loading factor (<0.1) and the kinematic energy of the outflow (~10^43 erg/s) suggest limited impact on star formation. The AGN component shows many similarities with little red dots (LRDs): a characteristic "V-shape", exponential profile in hydrogen lines, numerous detection of forbidden [Fe II] lines, a Balmer break, and a broad absorption feature at ~4550 {\AA}. This detection of a fast outflow in an LRD, rare in surveys dominated by low-resolution (e.g. PRISM) spectra, provides direct evidence of AGN activity in these systems.
Light from this galaxy traveled for 13 billion years — almost the entire age of the universe. When it began its journey, the Solar System did not yet exist.