Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1 (NIRCam Image, annotated)

This is an image from NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) on Webb that 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 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 twice as much mass as the galactic material surrounding it.

[Image description: Image with compass arrows, scale bar, and colour key. A deep field image showing objects of different size, colour, and shape. Three tiny, red circular objects are called out with small white boxes, and enlarged in pullouts labeled from top to bottom: QSO1A, QSO1B, and QSO1C. In the bottom left corner of the image are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The east arrow points toward 10 o’clock. The north arrow points toward 1 o’clock. At the bottom right corner of the image is a scale bar labeled 15 arcseconds. The image width is about 5.5 times the length of the scale bar. Below the image is a colour key showing which NIRCam filters were used to create the image and which visible light colour is assigned to each filter. From left to right: F115W (blue), F150W (blue), F200W (green), F277W (green), F356W (red), F444W (red).]