Forbidden black holes and ancient stars hide in these 'tiny red dots'

Forget "little green men"  — it is "little red dots" in the infant universe that caught the eye of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

The odd red bodies, scientists say, hide stars that models suggest are "too old" to have lived during early cosmic times and black holes that measure up to thousands of times larger than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Scientists believe these objects must have been born in a way unique to the early universe — by a method that seems to have ceased in the cosmos after around 1 billion years of its existence.

The three little red dots are seen as they were when the universe was between 600 million and 800 million years old. Though that may seem like a tremendously long time after the Big Bang, the fact that the universe is 13.8 billion years old means it was no more than 5% of its current age when these objects existed.

By confirming the existence of these dots in the early universe, these JWST findings could challenge what we know about the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes that sit at their hearts.

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The team, led by scientists from Penn State University, saw these Mysterious crimson cosmic oddities when investigating the early universe with the JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument as part of the RUBIES survey.

"It's very confusing," team member Joel Leja, an assistant professor of Astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. "You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time.