Soon after the start of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s science operations, astronomers noticed something unexpected in the data: red objects that appear small on the sky, located in the distant, young universe. Come to be known as “little red dots” (LRDs), this intriguing class of objects is not well understood at present, sparking new questions and prompting new theories about the processes that occurred in the early universe.

By combing through publicly available Webb datasets, a team of astronomers has recently assembled one of the largest samples of LRDs to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the big bang. They concluded that a large fraction of the LRDs in their sample likely are galaxies with growing black holes at their centers.