Francesco D'Eugenio

The red dot in the James Webb Space Telescope image is the galaxy Bz5.3, whose light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us. It lies behind the Bullet Cluster, whose gravitational field acted as a lens and brightened it by a factor of 3.7.

Astronomers pointed the James Webb at three galaxies whose light traveled 12 billion years. Early data pointed to incredibly fast growth — like an infant reaching adult height in just a year, clashing with the expansion of the Universe.

Light from a distant galaxy traveled to us for 13.4 billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope caught it and split it into colors. The spectrum shows a bright hydrogen line, like a fingerprint saying that galaxy GS-z13-1-LA is actively forming stars. Young hot stars inside the galaxy act like floodlights.

400 million years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope noticed a bright spot near the galaxy GN-z11 — like a distant lighthouse whose light pushed through the primordial darkness.

Cosmic black holes at the centers of galaxies are like giant banyan trees: their aerial root‑filaments stretch for kiloparsecs to harvest nourishing matter. For decades astronomers have debated: how does cooling gas from cluster atmospheres fall into the sphere of influence of a supermassive hole?

Two hundred forty-two thousand three hundred twenty-seven galaxies — like grains of sand on a beach. But astronomers turned this chaos into a map: the UMAP algorithm (a machine learning method) took from each galaxy eleven parameters — seven colors from optical to mid-infrared (that's photometry), magnitude…

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.

A marathon lasting 13 billion years started with different weights. A hundred solar masses — lighter than some gas clouds. A hundred thousand — gravitational dominance, comparable to an elephant among kittens. That's what black hole seeds looked like, ones that by our time should have turned into supermassive giants.