08/21/26

What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?

A drawing of red waves surround a glowing black dot in space.
Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like any known celestial objects, and astronomers began racing to figure out what they were.

There was a lot of hot debate, but researchers are making progress—the dots appear to be black holes, but black holes like we’ve never seen them before. In a recent study, astrophysicist Rohan Naidu and his team looked into one little red dot with the catchy name of MoM-BH*-1 and concluded it was a new cosmic category called a black hole star.


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Segment Guests

Rohan Naidu

Dr. Rohan Naidu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi.

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