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"... the James Webb Space Telescope would reveal new things about the cosmos. ...
When data started coming in as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, CEERS, astronomers noticed something unusual: The early universe is freckled with small, red galaxies that they’d never seen before.
These came to be known as “little red dots.” Their properties were so strange that they were deemed an entirely new class of cosmic object. ...
Evidence so far points to two possible explanations: Little red dots are likely either galaxies that host surprisingly large or luminous supermassive black holes, or they are compact galaxies with inexplicably huge numbers of old stars. ...
They are distinctive. Their spectra are characterized by a V shape caused by a slope decreasing in ultraviolet wavelengths and rising in optical wavelengths. By the latest tally, we’ve recorded about 340 of them.
As the name implies, they are little. A typical LRD has a radius of no more than 500 light-years—about 1% that of the Milky Way galaxy—and some are even smaller. And they are red, suggesting that either they emit primarily red light, or they emit red and blue light, but their blue light is filtered out by dust.
LRDs seem to only have existed in the early universe, emerging around 600 million years after the Big Bang and disappearing by about 1.5 billion years ago. We don’t see them at all in the local universe. ...
In fact, some estimates say little red dots require up to 100 billion stars to achieve their luminosity. That’s approximately the number of stars in the Milky Way, but in a hundredth of the space. ...
New research, presented in January ... to examine spectra of some LRDs. They found over 70% of the sample showed evidence of rapidly rotating gas—a hallmark sign of an accreting black hole. ..."
Newfound Galaxy Class May Indicate Early Black Hole Growth, Webb Finds "A team of astronomers sifted through James Webb Space Telescope data from multiple surveys to compile one of the largest samples of “little red dots” to date."
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