A few hundred million years after the Universe was born, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted unusual objects — tiny red dots. They are compact and very distant: their light is stretched by redshift, and their spectra show broad hydrogen lines, betraying the presence of black holes at the centers of galaxyies. But how did these holes manage to accrete millions of solar masses when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old? Conventional matter infall scenarios (Accretion disk) require much more time. Dust models don't bail us out.
The new study suggests viewing the red dots as a layered 'cosmic matryoshka doll'. In this model, at the center of a young galaxy, a supermassive star is born — a gas ball millions of solar masses in heft. Stars from the surrounding cluster punch through this ball, losing speed and energy. The motions of the plasma trigger a magnetic dynamo — a magnetic reconnection process that inflates the outer envelope to enormous sizes. It cools and starts glowing red, without any dust. This explains the red tint of the dots. Meanwhile, the captured stars inside form a hot, dense core spinning at tremendous speeds: that produces the broad lines in the spectrum.
Even Arthur Eddington understood that light can push gas. The central black hole does not grow from a local disk, but feeds on the light of the entire envelope. Instead of ordinary Accretion disk, it uses radiation that pushes on matter, forcing it to fall linearly. This slashes the mass assembly time to 67 million years, just right cosmologically. The dense envelope also serves as a natural shield: X-rays get stuck in it, so telescopes don't see them. Thus the model solves the X-ray silence problem.
Now the model predicts that the inner core should pulsate with periods of months or years. If future observations detect such variability in the red dots, it will be direct confirmation that active galactic nucleus at the dawn of the Universe grew inside giant stellar cocoons. This picture explains both the rapid growth and the appearance of these mysterious objects, unlike supernova remnant or other scenarios. The cosmic matryoshka turns out to be not just a metaphor, but a precise scheme that links star formation and the emergence of black holes.
If such a 'cosmic matryoshka' could be dropped into our Galaxy, its outer shell would span the size of Neptune's orbit and glow redder than any supergiant star.