Using observations from multiple powerful telescopes, a team of astronomers studied a red quasar nicknamed “the Hatchling” at redshift 3.7. They may have identified one of the clearest examples yet of a quasar caught in transition between a heavily obscured and fully exposed phase.
The team’s paper, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on July 25, presents evidence that its central black hole is already visible while powerful outflows continue to clear away the surrounding gas and dust.
Hidden monsters
A puzzling question that still has not been resolved in early-universe physics is whether dust-shrouded red quasars and unobscured bright quasars are separate objects or transitional stages of the same object. Some theories suggest that gas spiraling into the centers of galaxies can trigger intense star formation and drive rapid black hole growth in dust-shrouded systems. In turn, the activity of the feeding black hole can blow out the galaxy’s gas and dust or redistribute them, clearing channels or pathways through which light from the core can emerge.
The problem so far has been that the red color of the quasar and spectral signatures (broad lines in the spectrum) of an actively feeding black hole are not enough to catch the transition of such a hidden monster. Researchers need lots of different data on the same object at the same time, including the visible light emitted by the quasar, the infrared glow from warm dust, X-ray and radio signals confirming the black hole is truly active, and details of the host environment.
They also need spectroscopy detailed enough to separate light from gas swirling close to the black hole, light from gas farther out, absorption lines from dense gas blocking the black hole’s glow, and the outflows or winds blowing material outward.
A multiwavelength test
In this new study, a team led by Zheng Ma of Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona reported the identification of such a “clearing up” phenomenon. This unusual quasar was studied as it appeared when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old.
This was possible because the Hatchling happens to fall in a patch of sky that has been observed by an unusually large number of telescopes—the James Webb Space Telescope in the infrared (JWST; three instruments), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at millimeter wavelengths, X-ray observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, optical and near-infrared observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, optical data from the MUSE instrument installed at the Very Large Telescope, and radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA).
That means astronomers have access to simultaneous data across almost the entire spectrum, which is rare.
“The significance of this source lies in the broader difficulty of identifying quasars in such an emerging phase,” the team writes in the paper. The Hatchling provides such a test for this theory, the team explains, since its wide-ranging data let researchers examine these features together in “a single red Type-1 quasar during a phase when the nucleus is visible but its surrounding environment has not yet been fully cleared.”
‘The Hatchling’
The multiwavelength analysis showed that the central black hole is already visible, but at the same time, dense gas is blocking the quasar’s glow. This gives an overall picture of a black hole breaking free of its dusty shell, much like a hatchling emerging from an egg. They also found an extended halo of disrupted gas reaching roughly 65,000 light-years outward from the core.
“The Hatchling therefore captures a poorly explored but critical stage in quasar emergence: the accreting black hole is already visible, feedback is clearing the surrounding gas and dust, and the host galaxy is still assembling around an overmassive nucleus,” they conclude.
To further understand how common this phase is among the red quasar population and to pin down its duration, the team calls for systematic searches for such objects along with analysis of high-resolution spectroscopic data.
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Publication details
Zheng Ma et al, A quasar hatching from a buried red phase at z = 3.7, arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2607.22966
Journal information:
arXiv
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Astronomers catch ‘Hatchling’ quasar breaking out of its dusty cocoon (2026, August 5)
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