Overview
- Researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Cosmic Dawn Center report in Nature that many compact red sources seen by JWST are young, rapidly feeding supermassive black holes.
- Infrared spectra of a targeted sample match expectations for active galactic nuclei embedded in dense gas, including hydrogen moving at thousands of miles per second.
- The cocoon model accounts for the dots’ infrared redness by reprocessing high‑energy output and it suppresses X‑ray and radio signals that typically reveal accreting black holes.
- Recalculating properties under this framework reduces earlier mass estimates to roughly one‑hundredth, helping explain how such objects could exist so soon after the Big Bang.
- JWST first spotted the little red dots in December 2022 at epochs only hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, and scientists say additional observations will be needed to confirm the cocoon interpretation.