James Webb Telescope Sheds Light on Mysterious 'Little Red Dots'

Astronomers identify these high-redshift objects as likely active galactic nuclei, offering insights into early black hole growth.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has uncovered a new class of objects called 'Little Red Dots' (LRDs), small red sources abundant in the early universe.
A study analyzed 341 LRDs, most of which existed between 600 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, with numbers peaking around 1.5 billion years before sharply declining.
Spectroscopic data suggest that approximately 70% of LRDs exhibit signs of gas rotating at high speeds, indicative of accretion disks around supermassive black holes.
The findings suggest LRDs are active galactic nuclei (AGN), marking a previously undetected phase of obscured black hole growth in the early universe.
Researchers propose that the decline of LRDs may be linked to 'inside-out growth,' where star formation and black hole activity evolve outward, reducing obscuration over time.