When the James Webb Telescope first observed mysterious Little Red Dots in the early universe, astronomers looked on in disbelief. These strange objects, they realised, were distant, bright and strangely, unexpectedly, bafflingly red.
That’s a puzzle because young stars are blue and become red only later in life, when they are several billion years old. But these objects formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang and so could not be made of stars that old. In any case, stars are incapable of generating that much light, even collectively. More puzzling still, these Little Red Dots seem to disappear quickly from the early universe. The JWST has found very few of them after the universe reached the grand old age of about 1.5 billion years.
Explaining these dots has become one of the key challenges for astrophysicists. A consensus has emerged that Little Red Dots must be a type of Active Galactic Nuclei, compact central regions of galaxies that generally emit huge amounts of energy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Astronomers know that AGN elsewhere in the universe are powered by supermassive black holes gobbling up the dense gas and dust and stars that sit at the centre of galaxies, in the process spewing out radiation across the spectrum.
But Little Red Dots are different because, well, they are red. How come?
Join the Dots
Now we have an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Kohei Inayoshi at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Beijing, who proposes a bold explanation for the origin and fate of this cosmic anomaly. Inayoshi argues that Little Red Dots are the birth cries of black holes — brief, turbulent episodes that mark the first outbursts of growth from newly formed "seed" black holes. If correct, this insight will reshape our understanding of the earliest stages of black hole evolution and opens a new window on the dawn of cosmic structure.
The discovery of Little Red Dots has been one of the JWST’s most tantalizing revelations. Unlike typical Active Galactic Nuclei, which are extremely bright and often have large host galaxies, Little Red Dots are small — less than 100 parsecs in size — and dominated by broad emission lines superimposed on a red continuum.
These features suggest they are shrouded in dust, which tends to emit red light, with other light filtering through.
But what really caught astronomers’ attention was how common they appeared to be — several orders of magnitude more common than quasars, which are a common form of AGN in the older universe. That means Little Red Dots could be the dominant type of AGN in the early universe and eventually evolve into quasars as they get older.
Curiously, Little Red Dots are most common at redshifts z ~ 6–8 — when the universe was less than a billion years old — but their numbers drop sharply below z ~ 4 when the universe is about 1.5 billion years old.
Inayoshi’s key insight is that this pattern is an important clue to the nature of Little Red Dots. His proposal is that Little Red Dots are the first one or two accretion episodes of a newly formed black hole. In other words, they are are the birth cries of black holes.
Nobody knows exactly how these first black holes formed but the best guess is that they form during the collapse of dense, pristine gas clouds in the early universe. This process leaves them at the centre of exceptionally rich environments filled with cold gas.
As this gas funnels into the black hole it grows and emits radiation briefly while the cold gas surrounding it absorbs and filters much of this light.
“he unique characteristics of Little Red Dots are likely linked to the dense gas environments around the seed black holes, which create strong absorption features,” says Inayoshi.
In these early episodes, the black hole grows exponentially. A small seed that is 10,000 times the mass of our sun can balloon to around 10 million solar masses in just a few million years. But after this explosive beginning, the surrounding gas reservoir is depleted or blown away by radiation and winds, cutting off the fuel supply. The black hole enters a more stable, subdued growth phase, and the Little Red Dot fades.
This explains why these objects become so rare as the universe ages. Most of them simply evolve into ordinary AGNs or dormant black holes. “After these initial accretion episodes, the Little Red Dot features fade and the objects transition into normal AGNs,” concludes Inayoshi.
Red and Black
One of the most intriguing implications of this work is what it reveals about the formation of black holes themselves, a topic of keen interest for astronomers. The conditions that produce Little Red Dots — dense gas, low angular momentum, and rapid cooling—are consistent with the so-called “heavy seed” model. In this picture, black holes form not from stars, but directly from the collapse of gas, especially in overdense regions.
An alternative idea is that dark matter may be the reason for the unusual compactness of Litte Red Dots, which do not have visible host galaxies. By this thinking, a region of concentrated dark matter could lead to the collapse of dust clouds without significant star formation, producing a black hole before a galaxy ever fully forms.
In both cases, Little Rd Dots may be the first visible signal of a black hole forming in a previously unseen part of the universe. “[Little Red Dots] preserve crucial information on the formation of seed black holes and their early rapid growth phases,” says Inayoshi.
That’s interesting work that that transforms the mystery of the Little Red Dots into a powerful insight into one of astronomy’s great questions: how do black holes get their start? These tiny red glimmers, captured by the JWST, may be the fleeting primordial echoes of the universe’s earliest gravitational monsters awakening for the first time.
Ref: Little Red Dots as the Very First Activity of Black Hole Growth : arxiv.org/abs/2503.05537
