JWST just spotted baby supermassive black holes hiding in space
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has found what look like young, supermassive black holes tucked inside thick gas clouds.
These mysterious "little red dots" likely formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, according to a new study in Nature.
What are these 'little red dots?'
Researchers studied 30 of these bright, compact objects. Their light gets scattered by ionized gas, making them glow red and hiding their X-ray signals.
Gas swirling around them moves at a wild 1078258km per hour—pretty much confirming they're black holes.
Too bright and tiny to be anything else
Each "red dot" shines as much as 250 billion suns but fits into less than a third of a light-year—way too small for star clusters.
The team now thinks these black holes weigh between 100,000 and 10 million times the mass of our Sun, which is much lighter than earlier guesses.
Black holes are 'messy eaters'
Turns out these young black holes gobble up matter but fling most of it away through powerful jets.
Studying how they interact with their surroundings could help us figure out how the universe's biggest black holes got started.