In the early Universe, just eight hundred million years after the Big Bang, engines of unprecedented power were already igniting in the centers of young galaxies. Supermassive black holes were growing there — cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. Matter falling into the hole spirals into a scorching Accretion disk that outshines a trillion stars. But this light didn't break out right away: a thick mixture of cosmic dust and gas shrouded the central engine, like fog hides a searchlight. The powerful source remained invisible for millions of years — we call this hidden phase the seed of a future quasar.

Numerical simulation shows that sooner or later, the light pressure reaches the limit predicted by Arthur Eddington, and then the black hole literally blows tunnels through the gas cocoon. Jets of matter hurl cold clumps into the interstellar medium at insane speeds — over 1300 kilometers per second. These clumps pepper the entire halo around the galaxy, increasing the fraction of dense neutral hydrogen. And once the channels are punched through, ultraviolet and X-ray radiation break free, making the ejected gas glow in narrow spectral lines. Thus a giant nebula is born — a glowing trace of a recent 'breakthrough'.

These nebulae are veritable lighthouses for telescopes. Spectroscopy (splitting light into colors) on the JWST allows us to study their composition and shape. Astronomers, following the pioneer Maarten Schmidt, see in them evidence of rapid black hole growth at high redshift — the stretching of light due to the expansion of the Universe. Without these violent events, galactic evolution would proceed very differently: no ejections of cold gas and no metal enrichment. Thus the searchlight not only illuminates the fog — it rewrites its structure, and we read in the glowing clouds the story of how the black hole broke out of its gas prison.