Jonathan R. Trump

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.

Heir to the ideas of Edwin Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope has peered back to an era when the expansion of the universe was still picking up speed. At redshifts z>4, it spotted bizarre objects—"Little Red Dots" (LRDs).