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Little Red Dots Lead To Big Discoveries


Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.

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