Fabio Pacucci

The James Webb telescope peered into the early universe and saw a multitude of mysterious red dots. Their glow didn't resemble familiar galaxies or stars. The answer was unexpected: these are growing black holes, born without a stellar stage.

Observations by James Webb showed: already 500 million years after the Big Bang (at redshifts z~10), the Universe was aglow with black holes with masses of billions of solar masses. This baffles theories of gradual growth: matter would not have time to 'feed' the seeds at the required rate.

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?

For years, silence reigned in the heart of galaxy 1ES 1927+654: the accreting gas merely whispered in X-rays, leaking slow winds. But in 2022–2025, the picture changed dramatically. Spectra taken by XMM-Newton and Swift lit up with emission lines — a narrow peak at 0.56 keV, likely from OVII oxygen, a broader feature near 1 keV, and a powerful iron band in the 6–7 keV region.