Webb’s Tiny Red Dots Might Be Early-Phase Supermassive Black Holes

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope studied 12 ancient galaxies and found that the mysterious “little red dots” are likely supermassive black holes in their youth, not star-rich galaxies. They are extremely luminous yet incredibly compact (more than 250 billion suns in brightness but less than a third of a light-year across), implying black holes roughly 100,000 to 10 million solar masses. Their absence of X-ray/radio emission is explained by surrounding dense gas cocoons that scatter light. If confirmed, these objects could shed light on how massive black holes form in the early universe; the study appears in Nature.