Red and Black

Little Red Dots might be like Tootsie Roll Pops: colorful on the outside, dark on the inside. They may consist of a glowing cloud of gas and dust encircling a supermassive black hole. And they could be telling us about the birth of the first big black holes in the universe. Little Red Dots were first seen in 2022, by Webb Space Telescope. Since then, it’s discovered hundreds of them. They’re compact but extremely bright. And they’re so far away that we see them when the universe was no more than about one-tenth of its current age. Astronomers have proposed several explanations for them. One is the idea of a black hole surrounded by gas and dust. A recent study looked at a dot that was behind a huge cluster of galaxies. The cluster’s gravity magnified the view of the dot, making it easier to suss out its details. Its heart is a black hole about 50 million times the mass of the Sun. The surrounding cloud is no more than half that mass. As material in the cloud funnels inward, it gets hot, lighting up the rest of the cloud. The gas and dust absorb blue light, so we see only red. Astronomers have pondered the formation of early galaxies for decades. They’ve wondered whether the giant black holes in their hearts formed first, or if the galaxy came first and the black hole formed later. The new finding suggests that, in at least some cases, the black hole came first – born at the heart of a Little Red Dot. Script by Damond Benningfield