Makoto Ando

When the James Webb Space Telescope turned its gaze deep into time, astronomers expected to see familiar galaxies. Instead, the images were dotted with a scattering of bright, incredibly compact red dots.

Forty reddish sparks frozen in the images from JWST. The telescope spotted them in the depths of space, at distances where the Universe was less than two billion years old. These objects are active galactic nuclei — very compact and unusually red. Their color earned them the nickname 'little red dots' (LRDs).