{"id":275874,"date":"2026-02-01T20:25:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T20:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/275874\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T20:25:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T20:25:12","slug":"galactic-monsters-grew-in-cocoons-like-giant-bugs-scientists-say-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/275874\/","title":{"rendered":"Galactic Monsters Grew in Cocoons Like Giant Bugs, Scientists Say"},"content":{"rendered":"

How the most massive objects in the universe first formed is one of the biggest headscratchers in astrophysics. With more advanced telescopes, astronomers have found fully formed galaxies and colossal black holes earlier and earlier in the cosmos<\/a>, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This shouldn\u2019t be enough time for these structures to reach their incredible size; to astronomers, it\u2019s like stumbling on a fully-grown oak tree that\u2019s only a year old.<\/p>\n

The dilemma was put into hyperdrive by the James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s discovery of extremely bright \u201cLittle Red Dots<\/a>\u201d that were present when the universe was less than a billion years old, and are nowhere to be seen today. Though they\u2019re suspected to be some kind of compact galaxy, they would be almost impossibly dense at the mass they appear to have, wall-to-wall with stars, according to Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester and lead author of a new study<\/a> investigating the red objects published in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would need to produce stars at 100 percent efficiency, and that\u2019s not what we\u2019re used to seeing,\u201d he told Ars Technica<\/a>. \u201cGalaxies cannot produce stars at more than 20 percent efficiency, at least that\u2019s what our current knowledge is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another proposed explanation is that they\u2019re some kind of supermassive black hole. But this, too, is fraught: the red dots show no signs of the x-ray emissions produced by these objects. And if they were black holes, they would be \u201covermassive,\u201d weighing nearly as much as their entire surrounding galaxy, something that\u2019s never been observed in a conventional galaxy. How such an enormous monstrosity could form when the universe was still in its infancy is equally baffling.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, there may be a very tidy explanation. In his study, Rusakov and his team found that the gasses observed in the Little Red Dots, which astronomers use to infer the mass of invisible black holes, weren\u2019t moving as quickly as once thought. If so, that means that the black holes are around 100 times less massive than previously estimated.<\/p>\n

The upshot is that the supposedly \u201covermassive\u201d behemoths are actually just young supermassive black holes. But if that\u2019s the case, why don\u2019t they resemble any black holes that we\u2019re seeing today? The astronomers suggests that we may be witnessing a previously unknown \u201ccocoon\u201d stage of their evolution, during which they feed off of a dense, protective shell of ionized gas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey look like a [developing] butterfly or something in this young state that kind of grows wrapped in some sort of gas that also feeds it,\u201d Rusakov told Ars. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely new in the sense people didn\u2019t predict there should be such a cocoon phase in the supermassive black holes\u2019 lifecycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to feeding the black hole, the cocoon would also block the x-ray emissions we would expect to see, explaining their absence.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably one of the tidiest solutions out there to the Little Red Dots mystery, though there are more than a few. Other research suggests that they\u2019re galaxies which are unusually tiny because they haven\u2019t spun up to speed<\/a>. An even bolder hypothesis proposes they\u2019re \u201cblack hole stars<\/a>\u201d consisting of a black hole core surrounded by a sphere of gas so dense that it resembles the outer layers of a star. But if Rusakov and his team are on the right track, it raises another significant question that\u2019s been haunting astronomers. \u201cDoes the galaxy start with the supermassive black hole or with the stars?\u201d Rusakov pondered. \u201cIs that a chicken or the egg?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly what happens in this first sort of stage of galaxy formation,\u201d he added. \u201cBut our model gives us a new way to look at this kind of object.<\/p>\n

In our mature cosmos, black holes are formed from the collapse of dying star, but in the earliest moments of its existence, the extreme conditions may have given birth to these objects all around<\/a>, long before the first stars would be born.<\/p>\n

More on space: Mind Blowing James Webb Photo Shows Star Crumbling Into Dust<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How the most massive objects in the universe first formed is one of the biggest headscratchers in astrophysics.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[13035,61,60,60189,82,16474,134250],"class_list":["post-275874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-black-holes","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-little-red-dots","tag-science","tag-supermassive-black-hole","tag-vadim-rusakov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}