Are the James Webb Space Telescope's mysterious Little Red Dots actually tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang era?
New research suggests that Little Red Dots may actually be connected primordial black holes, tiny black holes born not from dying stars but rather from fluctuations in the density of matter just after the Big Bang, in the earliest moments of cosmic history.
Key points
- (Image credit: University of Massachusetts Amherst) Del Grosso and crew now intend to look at the other 100 or so Little Red Dots seen by the JWST to determine how many of them could have started life as primordial black holes.
- "Little Red Dots could surround astrophysical black holes, and most probably many of them do, but they could also be primordial black holes, if primordial black holes exist," De Luca said.
- Now, researchers have used JWST data to test whether one particular Little Red Dot, known as blackAbell 2744-QSO1 (QSO1), could host a primordial black hole.
Little Red Dots could be the smoking gun of primordial black holes Though scientists have theorized about the existence of primordial black holes since they were first proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, no hard evidence has presented itself.
Additional details
- Ever since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started observing the early universe, it has been providing almost as many surprises as it has answers.
- "So the question becomes, Which ones are primordial and how can we tell?" De Luca and colleagues turned their attention to QS01, located around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, which is seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
- "If primordial black holes do exist, then something had to happen to make them in the first place, which would be a groundbreaking discovery in physics." The team's findings were published in June in the journal Physical Review Letters.
- One such surprise are the so-called Little Red Dots, cosmic objects that seemingly disappear completely before the universe is two billion years old.
- Primordial black holes are a very different story," study team member Valerio De Luca, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Maryland, said in a statement.
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