Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1 (NIRCam Image)

An image from NIRCam (the Near Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744.

Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1) is a prototypical Little Red Dot, one of the first of now 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.

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 at least twice as much mass as the galactic material surrounding it.

Also known as Pandora’s Cluster, Abell 2744 was imaged in depth by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2013-2014 as part of the revolutionary Hubble Frontier Fields program, then as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program with Webb.

View the full NIRCam image and explore the observation on Space Telescope Live.