The James Webb telescope captured the mysterious red dots. Scientists don’t know what it is

– This is the first time in my career that I have studied an object for which we truly do not understand why it looks the way it does. I think it’s fair to call them a mystery – Jenny Greene, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, told CNN.

The solution to the puzzle

Although early theories suggested that they might be massive galaxies with active black holes, these objects were smaller than expected and did not show typical X-ray emission.

However, a turning point in the research came at the beginning of 2026, when a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen published a study that offers the most convincing explanation so far. By analyzing the spectrum of thirty such points, it was concluded that they are **young supermassive black holes** hidden inside dense “čahuras” of ionized gas.

The new models also suggest that these objects are actually a hundred times less massive than originally estimated. Their intense brightness and red color do not come from the stars, but from the stars. from the extreme heat of the gas that the black hole sucks in, and its light breaks through the dense envelope.

Their red color is the result of two factors: the cosmic redshift due to the expansion of the universe, and the dense dust and hydrogen gas that block blue light and allow only red wavelengths to pass through.

The key was an object called “Litica”

A big step towards understanding these objects happened back in 2023, when a team on board with Anna de Graaff from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the Webb Telescope to analyze thousands of red objects. Between them, there were about forty LRDs, and one stood out in particular – an object called “Litica” (eng. *The Cliff*).

The cliff got its name from the sharp transition in its light spectrum, from weak ultraviolet to bright red. De Graaff explained that this is caused by “very dense hydrogen gas that is somewhat warm,” confirming that the red color comes from the gas surrounding the central engine, not cosmic dust as previously thought. That central engine, it is believed, is precisely the black hole. If this is true, it is a phenomenon that, according to her words, “has never been observed before”.

An alternative theory about “universe-destroying” stars

Although the theory of young black holes is currently in the forefront, part of the scientific community is still considering other possibilities. In a scientific paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Devesh Nandal and Avi Loeb proposed that the red dots could be supermassive stars, so-called quasi-stars.

These primordial stars, which could grow to a mass a million times that of the Sun, formed from hydrogen and helium in the early universe and upon death collapsed directly into supermassive black holes.

Jorryt Matthee, the astrophysicist who coined the term “red dot”, believes these objects “could prove to be a kind of missing link”.

– We know that galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have supermassive black holes at their center, and although this is very common, it is a mystery how these supermassive black holes formed. LRDs could be the stage of birth, the baby phase of that formation, and maybe we are observing it for the first time – he stated.

To date, more than 340 such objects have been identified, and they appear in the period between 600 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is interesting that after that they practically disappear, which suggests that this is a short-lived but extremely violent phase of galaxy growth in the history of the universe.