Weizhe Liu

At the heart of nearly every large galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. As it devours gas, it blasts powerful outflows back into space, like a dragon that can't swallow all its prey and breathes fire. These 'winds' accelerate to thousands of kilometers per second and can sweep away the gas reservoirs from which stars are born.

There is something wildly generous about a garden where the first flowers don't just bloom but immediately scatter their seeds far beyond the fence. Something similar was happening in the young universe.

In the deep field of JWST, among thousands of galaxies, astronomers zoomed in on the source JADES-GS 209777 – and saw a cosmic chick. Its "shell" is a thick cocoon of gas and cosmic dust that long hid the growing black hole at its center. But at a redshift of 3,711 (1,8 billion years after the Big Bang), the shell began to crack.

In the grand hall of the cosmic masquerade, quasars are the most skilled actors. They don disguises, change their makeup, and pass themselves off as something they are not. Two such impostors caught astronomers' eyes: both claimed to be gravitationally lensed quasars in the early Universe, but scrutiny unmasked them.