Almost from the moment NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope saw first light, it spotted mysterious little red dots, or LRDs, glowing in the distance. They were thought to be extremely ancient and unusually mature galaxies that raised questions about galaxy formation.
A new, alternate theory is even weirder.
Seeking answers that were less vague, the international team of researchers who analyzed the first dataset that had been released by Webb in 2022 recently analyzed them again and came up with an alternative hypothesis for whatever these objects are. They look like stars. They also seem to act like stars, except not quite, because stars run on nuclear fusion while LRDs appear to be powered by something else. That something else is possibly a supermassive black hole for a core.
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