Ray A. Lucas

A massive galaxy cluster acts as a giant lens. Its gravity warps the fabric of space, and the light of distant objects, bending around this curvature, is amplified and split into multiple images.

Thanks to gravitational lens — an effect predicted by Fritz Zwicky, where a galaxy cluster acts like a magnifying glass — the James Webb Space Telescope spotted two red dots in a galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang.

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?