"Almost every new image showed mysterious, tiny red points. The spots were extremely compact, very bright and distinctly red. There were so many of them. Everywhere JWST looked, the telescope found at least one specimen of what are now commonly called Little Red Dots (LRDs). Astronomers quickly dated the dots to about 600 million years after the big bang, which means their light traveled almost the"
"They are in every single image the telescope takes, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist Rohan Naidu. We have to find out about them if we want to tell a complete story about the early universe. At first, astrophysicists coalesced around a few theories to explain LRDs, each of which has implications for the evolution of the universe. Little Red Dots might be compact galaxies with brightly belching black holes"
Images from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed numerous tiny, extremely compact, bright red points called Little Red Dots (LRDs). LRDs are dated to about 600 million years after the big bang, with light traveling nearly the universe's entire lifetime before reaching JWST's mirrors. The population is abundant across fields but largely vanishes by about 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The age, size, and number of LRDs suggest a new, JWST-visible phenomenon. Proposed explanations include compact galaxies hosting actively accreting black holes, a novel black-hole evolutionary stage, or dusty starburst galaxies undergoing intense star formation.
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