Webb’s Mysterious “Little Red Dots” May Be the Cradle of the First Black Holes

Mysterious “Little Red Dots” in the Early Universe Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have introduced a new idea to explain one of the strangest discoveries in the young universe: the so-called “little red dots.” In research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Fabio Pacucci and Abraham (Avi) Loeb argue that these unusual galaxies likely formed inside extremely rare dark matter halos that rotate far more slowly than most. The compact, faint objects were spotted in deep space images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and have unsettled current theories about how galaxies and black holes took shape in the early universe. Their study, “Cosmic Outliers: Low-Spin Halos Explain the Abundance, Compactness, and Redshift Evolution of the Little Red Dots,” proposes a physical explanation for what makes these galaxies so distinctive. “Little red dots are very compact and red distant galaxies that were completely undetected before the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Pacucci. “They are arguably the most surprising discovery by JWST to date. Our work shows that these could naturally form in dark matter halos with very low spin.”