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New James Webb telescope image may reveal the true identity of 'little red dots' - Space photo of the week
Yahoo • • science
Key Points:
- Astronomers have been puzzled by tiny, crimson-colored "little red dots" (LRDs) seen in early universe images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which appear compact and bright in infrared but vanish less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
- New observations combining JWST, Hubble, and Chandra data suggest LRDs may not have disappeared but changed appearance as the universe aged, possibly representing the bright central cores of ordinary galaxies at extreme distances.
- Researchers studied a nearby spiral galaxy nicknamed Saguaro, which has a compact, reddish core resembling LRDs, and used models to simulate how it would look from far away, finding it would appear as a tiny red dot like the distant LRDs.
- The findings imply LRDs are likely a phase in the growth of supermassive black holes in young galaxies rather than a new type of cosmic object, with their extended structures too faint to detect at great distances.
- Scientists are now searching for more galaxies like Saguaro to build a catalog of LRDs and better understand the co-evolution of galaxies and their central black holes throughout cosmic history.
