The small red dots observed by the Webb telescope a few hundred million years after the Big Bang could be fresh direct collapse black holes, born from the direct collapse of clouds of cold hydrogen, according to new simulations. If it fits, it would be a major breakthrough in understanding the evolution of the early universe.
Small red dots. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College).
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to peer into space shortly after the Big Bang. From this, scientists promised themselves that they would finally reveal what it really was like back then. The problem is that Webb sees things that no one expected, and if he does reveal something, it raises a lot of new questions. But that’s science.
Fabio Pacucci. Credit: Harvard University.
Among other things, the Webb telescope saw previously unknown bright red astrophysical objects in the universe that are only a few hundred million years old, which are eloquently called Little Red Dots i.e. Little Red Dots. The scientists among them are paf. At first it was said that these are extreme stellar nurseries, but this does not fit cosmological models, according to which massive galaxies could not have formed earlier than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Illustration of a black hole in direct collapse. Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
This led to the idea that they could be quasars. But even this is not consistent with cosmological models, because the Little Red Dots are observed in such a young universe that the supermassive black holes that are at the heart of quasars should not have had time to form. Well-known provocateur Avi Loeb, in turn, invented that it could be supermassive stars from the oldest population of the universe with zero metallicity and the mass of millions of Suns.
Fabio Pacucci z centra Harvard & Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) a Black Hole Initiative (BE) at Harvard University is convinced with his colleagues that the Little Red Dots are actually black holes in direct collapse (Direct Collapse Black Holes), which would of course be a very nice discovery. So far, these are only hypothetical black holes, which should be formed in the early universe by the collapse of an entire cloud of cold hydrogen. They should be extremely massive from the very beginning, about the size of hundreds of thousands of Suns.
If this scenario worked, it would mean that very massive black holes could indeed appear in the young universe, almost as if by magic. The researchers arrived at this through simulations of radiation and hydrodynamics. The results of the simulations, which match the observations, sit on direct collapse black holes that are furiously gobbling up matter from their surroundings. If Pacucci et al. truth, there is reason to celebrate.
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date:2026-02-11 09:20:00
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