Jian-Min Wang

Among the precious scatterings of the early Universe captured by James Webb, there are objects that resemble ruby beads scattered on black velvet. These are the 'little red dots' (LRDs) — compact sources with steep red spectra, inside which lurk supermassive black holes up to a hundred million solar masses.

At the heart of nearly every large galaxy shines an active nucleus — a supermassive black hole surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of incandescent gas. The disk itself flickers, but astrophysicists suspect that within it lurks a whole swarm of small, stellar-mass black holes.

In the vast choir of galactic nuclei, some voices ring out louder than the rest. In quasars whose spectral nitrogen lines are anomalously strong, the chemical makeup of the gas in the broad-line region (the gas whipping around the black hole at enormous speeds) long remained a puzzle. Astronomers argued: is all the gas there simply rich in metals, or has nitrogen in particular been added beyond measure?