The Webb telescope captured distant galaxies as red dots. Their unusual color is the result of super-dense gas around black holes. Like a lighthouse in thick fog, losing its blue rays and appearing red, the light from these objects struggles through a blanket of compressed hydrogen. The density is so high that a cubic meter of gas would weigh as much as a mountain.

But splitting light into a rainbow — spectroscopy — showed: hydrogen lines (Balmer series) are bright in the red part, faint in the blue. Usually cosmic dust does this, but there’s barely any. Around black holes, it’s not dust that thickens, but a dense fog of hydrogen — and it recolors the light.

This explains why the reddening leaves no heat signature: no dust, it’s all about the foggy veil. And the giant black holes themselves, stripped of stellar surroundings, grew faster than their galaxies already in the young universe. Likely, this is the missing link to quasars.