In the deep field of JWST, among thousands of galaxies, astronomers zoomed in on the source JADES-GS 209777 – and saw a cosmic chick. Its "shell" is a thick cocoon of gas and cosmic dust that long hid the growing black hole at its center. But at a redshift of 3,711 (1,8 billion years after the Big Bang), the shell began to crack.
On one hand, the Accretion disk (the swirling hot gas around the hole) is already sending broad emission lines and X-ray emission at a power of 1,7×10⁴⁴ erg/s – meaning the core is almost exposed. On the other hand, the Hα line shows absorption at a velocity of +475 km/s, as if a dense curtain still flutters in front of it. Even helium in that curtain is approaching with a blueshift of −310 km/s. The chick has already pecked through, but chunks of shell still cling to it.
The bird inside isn't just growing – it's blowing out its chamber. Instruments caught multiphase outflows: ionized oxygen ([OIII]) speeds up to 2000 km/s, while cooler magnesium and sodium leak away more slowly. The total material loss rate reaches 37 solar masses per year. This feedback (active galactic nucleus) cleans the surroundings and will eventually turn the red quasar into a normal, unobscured one.
The host galaxy of the Chick is also furiously forming stars – at a rate of about 300 solar masses per year, hundreds of times more active than the Milky Way. ALMA picked up its dust emission: the dust mass is about 50 million solar masses. Meanwhile, the black hole itself has already accumulated 2,5×10⁸ solar masses – about 1/100 of the stellar mass of its host galaxy. This ratio is markedly higher than in mature galaxies in the local universe, indicating that the hole is growing faster than its surroundings.
The Chick is rare evidence that red quasars are not a special class, but a brief stage on the way to a fully optical quasar. Systematic searches for such "hatching" objects in JWST fields will measure how long this transitional epoch lasts. Perhaps every future quasar was once such a chick. High-resolution observations and numerical models of feedback will help us understand in detail exactly how the black hole's radiation breaks the shell and regulates the growth of the whole galaxy.
The Chick earned its name because its spectrum resembles a hatching chick – the bright core is already breaking through a shell of dust and gas. Fun fact: neighboring galaxies at distances of 12 and 66 thousand light-years might be "members of the same nest" – perhaps a protocluster at z=3.7.