Vasily Kokorev

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.

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.

Imagine a city where a skyscraper and a huge park are being built at the same time. The skyscraper grows upward, and the park expands outward. Both processes are fast and get in each other's way, but in the end they are meant to become a single whole. That's the situation in galaxy GNz7q: a black hole grows at the center while new stars burst to life around it.

A fountain shoots from the center of the city at a speed thousands of times faster than a courier bike. Such a 'fountain'—a stream of gas accelerated to 5500 kilometers per second — has been spotted by astronomers in the galaxy GLIMPSED-329380.

When JWST peered into the young universe at redshifts of 6–10, it revealed a scattering of mysterious 'little red dots' (LRDs). These objects combined features of galaxies and active nuclei, but their spectra refused to fit into familiar patterns.

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?

In a distant galaxy, light from hot gas should reveal its composition. The James Webb Telescope split that light into a spectrum, and astronomers saw: oxygen lines too weak.