The universe is so saturated with galaxies that even the weirdest things can go unnoticed for years after Hubble Space Telescope "deep-exposure" observations are taken. In sort of an intergalactic Where's Waldo, an international team of astronomers uncovered in Hubble archival data a mysterious red dot nearly in the middle of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North). As innocuous as it looks, it could be a rare missing link between some of the very earliest galaxies and the birth of supermassive black holes. The object, referred to as GNz7q, existed when the universe was just a toddler, only 750 million years after the big bang. The mixture of radiation from the object cannot be attributed to star formation alone. The best explanation is that it is a growing black hole shrouded in dust. Given time, the black hole will emerge from its dusty cocoon as a brilliant quasar, an intense beacon of light at the heart of an early galaxy. The pioneering Hubble telescope has provided a unique target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to use its spectroscopic instruments to study objects like GNz7q in unprecedented detail.

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