JWST's 'little red dots' aren't galaxies. They're black holes wrapped in gas.
Since 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has been turning up compact red objects in the deep universe that nobody predicted. More than 300 of these “little red dots” have been catalogued so far, all crammed into a narrow epoch between about 600 million and 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. For four years, they’ve driven a sharp debate: are they impossibly massive galaxies, overgrown black holes, or something we haven’t modelled yet? A paper published on June 10 in The Astrophysical Journal by Vasily Kokorev and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin delivers the strongest answer so far. The object they studied, GLIMPSE-17775, is a supermassive black hole cocooned in dense, hot gas — and the data suggest most little red dots are, too. ...