Little Red Dot Abell 2744-QSO1 in Sculptor | James Webb Space Telescope
This is an image from Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on Webb that shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744.
Detailed study of the brightest of the three lensed images, QSO1A (upper right), shows that the object consists of a central supermassive black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas with very small amounts of heavier elements like oxygen. Unlike supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies, which make up only a tiny fraction of their host galaxy’s total mass, QSO1’s black hole contains twice as much mass as the galactic material surrounding it.
Image Description: Image showing hundreds of bright objects of varying size, color, and shape on the black background of space. Colors range from white to deep red. Shapes include elliptical, spiral, dot-like, dash-like, and arcuate.Three objects in the central part of the image are called out with small white boxes that contain images of the three objects. From top to bottom these are labeled QSO1A, QSO1B, and QSO1C. At the center of each box is a tiny, circular red dot. QSO1A (top) is notably larger, brighter, and clearer than the other two. QSO1B, in the middle, is the smallest and fuzziest, and is somewhat washed out by the light of a larger white object next to it.
An image detail from Webb’s NIRCam shows the Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1, gravitationally lensed by Abell 2744, an enormous mega-cluster of galaxies also known as Pandora’s Cluster.
Pulled out to the right is a map showing the speed that gas is moving toward or away from the telescope (rotational velocity) in different parts of QSO1. The map was made with data collected using NIRSpec’s integral field unit (IFU), a combination of camera and spectrograph. The IFU gathers an image along with 900 spectra from a square patch of sky 3 arcseconds by 3 arcseconds, creating maps showing differences in brightness of thousands of wavelengths between 0.6-micron and 5.3-micron light across the object. The gas velocity is calculated based on Doppler shift: the colors are shifted slightly toward shorter (bluer) wavelengths where material is moving toward us, and longer (redder) wavelengths where it is moving away.
The Webb data shows that the glowing gas has Keplerian rotation: it is orbiting a central point in the same way that planets orbit a star. This means that most of the mass of QSO1 must reside in a single point in the center, i.e., a black hole. Because the velocity of the orbiting gas follows very simple laws of gravity, the data can then be used to calculate the mass of the black hole: It appears to be 50 million solar masses, or 50 million times the mass of our Sun. This is about two-thirds of the entire mass of QSO1.
Image Description: Left: Space telescope image shows small, red, circular object outlined with white square. Scale bar in bottom left corner labeled 1 arcsecond shows that image is about 4 arcseconds across and object is about 0.4 arcseconds across. Right: Enlarged view of Little Red Dot overlaid with dumbbell-shaped array of pixels ranging in color from blue to orange. Dumbbell shape is vertical, and pixels are oriented at 45 degrees. Below pixels is blue to orange scale bar showing that color of each pixel is related to gas velocity in kilometers per second. Left side of scale bar grades from blue (labeled 20) to gray (labeled 0). Blue arrow pointing left from 0 to 20 beneath left (blue) side of scale bar is labeled toward. Orange arrow pointing right from 0 to 20 beneath the right (orange) side labeled away. Pixels on lower half of dumbbell shape are blue to gray.
The first image is from Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on Webb that shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744.
The second image is a close-up image from Webb’s NIRCam showing the Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1, gravitationally lensed by Abell 2744, an enormous mega-cluster of galaxies also known as Pandora’s Cluster.
Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1) is a prototypical Little Red Dot, one of the first of hundreds of tiny glowing flecks of infrared light that Webb has found speckling the early Universe. QSO1 is roughly 1,300 light-years across and with a cosmological redshift (z) of 7, its light dates back to just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 5% of its current age.
QSO1 is ideal for study because it is gravitationally lensed, both magnified and triply imaged by Abell 2744, the intervening mega-cluster of galaxies that warps its surrounding space-time.
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? Scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. However, it is hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early Universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.
Now, researchers using Webb have detected clear evidence that certain supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Furtak (Ben-Gurion University), R. Maiolino (Cambridge), F. D'Eugenio (Cambridge), I. Juodžbalis (Cambridge), H. Übler (MPE), C. Marconcini (University of Florence). Image Processing: A. Pagan
Release Date: May 27, 2026
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