Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have gotten the first-ever look at the light of ancient stars shining around some of the biggest, brightest and oldest black holes in the universe.
Quasars — galactic cores containing active supermassive black holes — are among the most ancient things in the universe. As dust and gas accelerate toward the quasar's central black hole, the quasar emits such bright radiation — typically a thousand times brighter than the entire Milky Way — that astronomers have a hard time observing the fainter light of stars in the quasar's galaxy. This makes it challenging to study the galaxy's shape and mass.
