Captured by Webb’s NIRCam, composite images use infrared filters to sample light wavelengths. Monochromatic exposures were assigned the colors red, green and blue for clarity.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Dale Kocevski/Colby College
Like tiny photobombers, cosmic anomalies resembling small, bright red points show up in almost every snapshot taken by the most powerful space telescope ever made. Astronomers now call them little red dots, or LRDs, but there is no agreement yet on what exactly they are. Since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope started peering into the universe four years ago, hundreds of the puzzling objects have appeared in its images.
An artist’s impression (not to scale) reveals a black hole and its accretion disk within a cutout. What makes this a “black hole star” is the surrounding turbulent gas. The configuration can explain what astronomers observe in the object they call “The Cliff.”
MPIA/HdA/T. Müller/A. de Graaff
The biggest surprise, de Graaff added, is an object she calls “The Cliff,” the features of which appear to disprove early hypotheses for what LRDs could be. “This source is really the first one where we could say unambiguously, this is neither a normal galaxy nor a dust-shrouded black hole — it has to be something else,” she said. “It was a bit of a breakthrough moment.”
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