The ‘Little red dots’ observed by Webb were direct-collapse black holes

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to look back in time and study galaxies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. In so doing, scientists hoped to gain a better understanding of how the universe has evolved from the earliest cosmological epoch to the present. When Webb first trained its advanced optics and instruments on the early universe, it discovered a new class of astrophysical objects: bright red sources that were dubbed “Little Red Dots” (LRDs). Initially, astronomers hypothesized that they could be massive star-forming regions, but this was inconsistent with established cosmological models.