{"id":591927,"date":"2026-04-18T15:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T15:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/591927\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T15:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T15:01:08","slug":"mysterious-red-dot-galaxies-could-have-relic-black-holes-predating-the-big-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/591927\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious \u2018Red Dot\u2019 Galaxies Could Have \u2018Relic\u2019 Black Holes Predating the Big Bang"},"content":{"rendered":"

What was going on before the Big Bang? (Anything interesting?<\/a>) Well, one astrophysicist now proposes that the mysterious \u201clittle red dots\u201d first detected by the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>\u00a0and dated to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang<\/a> might just be evidence of an older universe before our own, one now lost to time.<\/p>\n

In reality, of course, these very early \u201clittle red dots\u201d are enormous, each one its own massive galaxy, with enough stars in its primordial swirl to rival the Milky Way as it exists today. Some astronomers took<\/a> to calling these dots \u201cuniverse breakers,\u201d because their very existence has complicated older models of how the early goo of the universe first coalesced into being as young planets, stars, and galaxies.<\/p>\n

But now, according to Enrique Gaztanaga, a professor at the University of Portsmouth\u2019s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, these seemingly premature and very complex galaxies might actually be proof that the Big Bang was something more like a recurring \u201cBig Bounce.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this picture, the universe undergoes a phase of contraction before the big bang,\u201d Gaztanaga argues<\/a>\u00a0in a piece for The Conversion explaining his new study. \u201cInstead of collapsing into a singularity, it rebounds, beginning a new expanding phase.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaztanaga contends that, swept up in this vast and impossibly old cycle, like eldritch buoys rocked back and forth by the cosmic tide, are a phenomena he calls \u201crelic\u201d black holes.<\/p>\n

\"LittleAbove, a few of the mysterious \u2018little red dots\u2019 first detected by the James Webb Space Telescope. \u00a9 NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College) Relics from lost galaxies <\/p>\n

Gaztanaga\u2019s argument in favor of his relic black hole theory rests on the idea that these dense balls of matter, which (as you know) exert a vacuum-like pull on matter all around them, would have had enough resistance to counter any opposing pull towards the epicenter of a Big Bounce.<\/p>\n

The time-tested Pauli exclusion principle, developed a century ago by physicist Wolfgang Pauli (and still in use today to help explain<\/a> the formation of neutron stars), details how these interactions might go down. Subatomic \u201cneutron degeneracy pressure,\u201d which prevents certain highly dense supermassive stars from collapsing into even denser black holes, under certain conditions, could mirror similar density limits that would protect these relic black holes.<\/p>\n

According to Gaztanaga\u2019s calculations, published<\/a> this February in the journal Physical Review D., a variety of celestial phenomena, including black holes, could \u201csurvive the bounce as relics\u201d so long as they are larger than 295 feet (90 meters). \u201cThese relics,\u201d he wrote in The Conversion, \u201ccan include black holes, gravitational waves and density fluctuations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relic black holes, Gaztanaga also determined, could theoretically be formed in another way, too. As large diffuse halos of matter and once swirling galaxies are caught in the tightening pull of a universe contracting for another Big Bounce, those celestial bodies might instead collapse into a black hole that then resists any further pull toward the bounce\u2019s epicenter.<\/p>\n

Dark matters <\/p>\n

If it turns out that the mechanisms that might create and preserve relic black holes are common enough, more of them might be out there than those at the center of the \u201clittle red dot\u201d galaxies observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. The dense, light-absorbing mass of myriad orphaned, solitary, or otherwise hidden relic black holes, in fact, might even be the missing gravitational pull that physicists have long attributed to so-called dark matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelic black holes offer a compelling alternative,\u201d according to Gaztanaga. \u201cIf the bounce produces enough of them, they could make up a significant\u2014perhaps dominant\u2014fraction of dark matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many astrophysicists have held out hope that dark matter would one day prove to be a fundamental particle distributed across the universe, ideas that have included dark photons<\/a>, axions<\/a>, and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (or WIMPs)<\/a>. But in the absence of conclusive proof, others have also broached alternative hypotheses focused on black holes, searching for evidence of miniature primordial black holes<\/a>, which would be small, very old, and honestly not all that conceptually dissimilar from Gaztanaga\u2019s relic black holes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuch work remains to be done,\u201d Gaztanaga admitted. \u201cBut the possibility is profound: the universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded. And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the big bang.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What was going on before the Big Bang? (Anything interesting?) Well, one astrophysicist now proposes that the mysterious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[8149,13640,8150,10239,79,193],"class_list":{"0":"post-591927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-astrophysics","9":"tag-big-bang","10":"tag-black-holes","11":"tag-dark-matter","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}