Dale D. Kocevski

Data from the James Webb Telescope showed: mysterious red dots in the early universe are growing black holes. They emerged directly from gas clouds, without forming stars, and are now devouring matter at an incredible rate. This explains how supermassive black holes managed to grow so quickly.

In a new study presented in the MEOW survey, astronomers used the MIRI infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope to search for dust-obscured active galactic nuclei from an era when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Analyzing the emission from hot dust allowed them to identify 1