Astronomers appear to have cracked one of the great mysteries of the James Webb Space Telescope — the origin of so-called little red dots, compact red objects from the early universe that images have revealed since 2022. According to a study published on June 10 in The Astrophysical Journal, they are rapidly growing supermassive black holes shrouded in a dense envelope of hot gas. NASA ↗
The team led by Vasilij Kokorev of the University of Texas at Austin obtained the most detailed spectrum yet of such an object, GLIMPSE-17775, dating from approximately 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. A stroke of luck helped: the object lay exactly behind the galaxy cluster Abell S1063, whose gravity amplified its light like a lens — 30 hours of observation thus had the effect of roughly 80, and Webb captured more than 40 spectral lines. Der Standard ↗
Gas falling into the black hole heats up and glows, which explains the objects' characteristic red color. The holes are smaller than they appeared, so the result eases concerns that early galaxies formed too quickly and thus violate the cosmological model. "Everything fits, nothing is broken," Kokorev summarized. Space.com ↗
The mystery of "little red dots" from the early universe may be solved: they are growing black holes
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