Eduardo Bañados

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?

In 1963, Maarten Schmidt unraveled the nature of quasars — distant active nuclei outshining entire galaxies. Since then, we've learned that at their hearts lurk supermassive black holes, converting infalling matter into blinding light.

In the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the universe was a dark ocean in which the first stars and black holes ignited. Some of those black holes shot out narrow jets of plasma traveling at nearly the speed of light. If such a jet points straight at Earth, we see it as a bright spot: a blazar.