Feige Wang

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 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.

In the grand hall of the cosmic masquerade, quasars are the most skilled actors. They don disguises, change their makeup, and pass themselves off as something they are not. Two such impostors caught astronomers' eyes: both claimed to be gravitationally lensed quasars in the early Universe, but scrutiny unmasked them.