When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like any known celestial objects, and astronomers began racing to figure out what they were.

There was a lot of hot debate, but researchers are making progress—the dots appear to be black holes, but black holes like we’ve never seen them before. In a recent study, astrophysicist Rohan Naidu and his team looked into one little red dot with the catchy name of MoM-BH*-1 and concluded it was a new cosmic category called a black hole star.

Guest:

Dr. Rohan Naidu is an assistant professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?

Science Friday

What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?