A new statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that color vision evolved in animals around 500 million years ago, long before the evolution of colorful fruits and flowers, which started sprouting 200 to 350 million years ago. The researchers focused on what they term “conspicuous colors”—basically, the ones kids are likeliest to select in a 16 pack of Crayolas—red, orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Around 150 million years ago, presumably to capitalize on the well-established prevalence of color vision, species began evolving warning coloration. And 50 million years later, there was an evolutionary explosion of both warning and sexual coloration. Although the reasons behind this evolutionary burst are still unclear, the researchers identified three warning signal animal vectors behind it: ray-finned fishes, birds and lizards.

Additionally, warning coloration is much more widespread among species than sexual coloration, likely because colorful animals do not themselves need to have color vision to signal the danger they pose to other, color-sensitive species. Sexual color signals, on the other hand, are confined to vertebrate and arthropod species that have well-developed color vision.

Using data from NASA’s JWST and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of U.S. National Science Foundation NOIRLab astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang that is consuming matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s ‘feast’ could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early Universe.

Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the Universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate, seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early Universe.

LID-568 was discovered by a cross-institutional team of astronomers led by International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh. They used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a sample of galaxies from the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray part of the spectrum, but are invisible in the optical and near-infrared. JWST’s unique infrared sensitivity allows it to detect these faint counterpart emissions.