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James Webb’s “Little red dots”: Are they the missing link between black holes and galaxies?
The tiny red dots that are rewriting the history of the Universe Imagine discovering something so bizarre that even veteran astrophysicists can’t agree on what to call it. That’s exactly what happened the moment the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its eyes on the cosmos in 2022: thousands of tiny red dots turned up scattered across images of the early universe — and four years later, they’re still upending everything we thought we knew about how galaxies are born. What exactly are the “little red dots”? When astronomer Ivo Labbé’s team (Swinburne University of Technology) combed through some of Webb’s first deep-field images, they stumbled on 13 bright red…

