Anna-Christina Eilers

The James Webb Space Telescope looks back in time and sees the universe when it was less than a billion years old. In this young universe, galaxies already shine, and at their centers sit supermassive black holes — the ones that will later grow into giants. How did they manage to gain mass so quickly?

When JWST peered into the young universe at redshifts of 6–10, it revealed a scattering of mysterious 'little red dots' (LRDs). These objects combined features of galaxies and active nuclei, but their spectra refused to fit into familiar patterns.

The Universe is less than a billion years old, yet at its centers already sit black holes with masses of a billion suns. According to the conventional picture, they grew by voraciously devouring matter, but calculations show that 'feeding' must have been almost continuous, while visible quasar flares last only a few million years. So where does all the accreting fuel go?