A team from the University of Texas at Austin and its partners is a winner of the 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair for shedding new light on mysterious red dots, a newly discovered class of astronomical objects.<\/p>\n
When the Webb space telescope first opened its eyes onto the early universe, it revealed something strange: luminous, red-tinted dots billions of light years away from Earth. And they were everywhere, appearing in almost every deep-field image. There was one problem, though: scientists had never seen those dots before and had no idea what they were. Their very existence, however, calls into question everything we knew about the distant cosmos.<\/p>\n
The question <\/p>\n
Can astronomers identify a new class of objects found in the early universe, and what do these findings suggest about the formation of the earliest galaxies and black holes?<\/p>\n
The results <\/p>\n
Vasily Kokorev, a researcher at the University of Texas, was first drawn to the little red dots for the mystery. \u201cYou don\u2019t always get a chance to study something that people understand very little,\u201d he told Gizmodo. \u201cIt\u2019s very interesting and kind of refreshing\u2026to speculate on the nature of these objects.\u201d<\/p>\n
Out of the hundreds of dots that showed up in Webb\u2019s images, Kokorev and his team focused on just one lucky dot. The object, designated GLIMPSE-17775, appeared magnified due to gravitational lensing by a galaxy cluster. As a result, those 30 hours of telescope time gathered as much signal as nearly 80 hours of observation would have without the magnification.<\/p>\n
Webb\u2019s infrared sensitivity, combined with the cosmic magnifying glass, meant that astronomers got an extremely detailed look at GLIMPSE-17775. \u201cWe got the spectrum, and we were just kind of scrolling through them to see if anything cool popped up,\u201d Kokorev said. \u201cThen we see this spectrum of enormous complexity. Everything is very, very unique, and your imagination starts running wild.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s findings were published<\/a> in The Astrophysical Journal earlier this year, providing unprecedented detailed analysis of the gas surrounding the little red dots. The data collected by Webb supported an earlier interpretation that this object is a black hole star, a rapidly growing black hole enveloped in a thick cocoon of gas.<\/p>\n The term \u2018black hole star\u2019 is meant to relay the complex nature of the little red dots, which lack many properties usually observed in accreting black holes while appearing more star-like.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey show a lot of properties similar to stars, except that they cannot be normal stars because they\u2019re way too luminous,\u201d Jorryt Matthee, an observational astronomer at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, told Gizmodo. \u201cThey\u2019re a million times more luminous than any star we had known before, and this really triggered my curiosity. Like, why does it look so much like a star, but it cannot really be a star?\u201d<\/p>\n Matthee is a member of the team of researchers who coined the term \u201cblack hole star.\u201d The newly proposed term is still debated, however, and not everyone is a fan, according to Matthee. \u201cWe initially also coined the term \u2018little red dots,\u2019 which is a much more interpretation-free term. That\u2019s just how they look,\u201d he said. \u201cBlack hole star carries some interpretation\u2014that\u2019s why there\u2019s community resistance to that.\u201d<\/p>\n More importantly than the name is what these objects suggest about the early universe. The little red dots ultimately suggest that black holes and galaxies grew at astonishingly fast rates between 500 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very clear that these black holes are forming in these dense gas environments and that they are either born very massive or they are growing faster than we thought black holes could grow,\u201d Matthee said. \u201cThis is the big piece of this puzzle of solving why there are black holes in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n Why they did it <\/p>\n As part of his work, Matthee spent years simulating images of the early universe. Once the Webb images started coming in, everything looked as expected except for the little red dots. \u201cThose were not in my simulation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When Webb first discovered the little red dots, some researchers thought the universe was broken. Astronomers initially thought they were impossibly massive galaxies. They were unable to explain how an object could have become so big in a small amount of time after the Big Bang to account for their luminosity.<\/p>\n Once astronomers began collecting more data, the little red dots had some features normally associated with galaxies, some with black holes, and some with stars. \u201cNothing quite fits the data,\u201d Anna de Graaff, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, told Gizmodo. \u201cWe had a lot of debates on who was right, and I think in the end everyone\u2019s wrong to some degree.\u201d<\/p>\n