Little Red Black Hole

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College) A sample of Little Red Dots observed by JWST’s NIRCam detector. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first looked at the darkest regions of the sky, it was able to see objects fainter and more distant than ever before. It revealed a few surprises about the early cosmos, and one of them was the discovery of Little Red Dots (LRDs). LRDs are reddish, point-like objects seen when the Universe was only a billion years old. Astronomers had no idea what they were. The obvious idea is that they must be young and powerful active black holes. Perhaps the seeds of the first galaxies. But active black holes generate powerful radio and X-ray light, like quasars, while LRDs do not. Another idea is that they are tremendously large progenitor stars. Powerfully bright stars made only of hydrogen and helium. LRDs have a spectrum similar to models of the first stars, but the spectra also show a strong rotational Doppler shift. LRDs seem to…