Nikko J. Cleri

A distant red object usually means one thing: we're seeing a dust veil over a scorching disk falling into a black hole. But when the James Webb split its light into shades, a shadow appeared inside — just like steam from boiling water intercepts rays.

If you turn on a lamp in a room, it illuminates the walls. But if you place the same lamp in a vast hall, the light barely reaches the corners. Similarly, radiation from young stars affects gas in a galaxy: it knocks electrons out of hydrogen atoms, making the gas glow.

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).

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?

An orchestra of six distant galaxies should have played loudly, but the percussion section was missing. Astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at them, expecting to hear the sharp bursts thought to accompany star birth. Instead, they recorded only a steady hum. Each of these galaxies is so far away that its light has traveled for more than ten billion years.