SCIENCE

JWST fully solves the mystery of “Little Red Dots” | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Jan, 2025

VermontDigitalNews.com 1 week ago

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These six “little red dot” galaxies are examples of objects that, if their brightness was caused by the stars within them alone, could not have grown to such high masses in such short amounts of cosmic time under our currently prevailing cosmological picture. It’s possible that our cosmology is wrong, but it’s also possible, and perhaps more likely, that our naive assumptions about the light from these objects being entirely due to stars. (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))

The discovery of ultra-bright, ultra-distant galaxies was JWST’s first big surprise. They didn’t “break the Universe,” and now we know why.

In the summer of 2022, our views of the distant Universe — and our story of how galaxies formed and grew up — changed forever as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began science operations. With superior light-gathering power, it could detect fainter objects than ever before. With superior resolution, it could differentiate single-source objects from extended or multi-source objects better than ever before. And with its infrared-specialized capabilities, it could detect more distant, high-redshift objects than ever before. With the incredible technology aboard JWST, we were poised to learn about the earliest stages of cosmic history as far as stars, galaxies, and supermassive black holes were concerned.

Based on all we had learned previously, we had expectations for:

how many galaxies we would see early on in cosmic history,
what the masses and brightnesses of those galaxies would be,
and how much of that generated light would come from stars, versus how much came from active supermassive black holes within them.

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