LRDs, or Little Red Dots, were discovered in the first months after the James Webb Space telescope was turned on. However, since then they have perplexed scientists about what they are and what is causing the light. That is, until now.
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00:00These are LRDs, or what NASA not-so-scientifically calls Little Red Dots.
00:09They were discovered in the first months after the James Webb Space Telescope was turned
00:13on.
00:14But since then, experts have been perplexed about what they are.
00:16They have figured out, however, that nearly all of them existed in the early days of the
00:20universe, within 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
00:24The light spectrum is also interesting, because they are only giving off a particular redshift,
00:28which is why Webb was the first telescope to find them.
00:31And oh yeah, whatever they are, most of them also appear to contain supermassive black
00:35holes that are growing.
00:37When experts first analyzed these dots, they were absolutely confounded as they seemed
00:41to break present theories of cosmology.
00:43That's because their presence implied that galaxies could grow extremely large, extremely
00:47quickly, which our current theories couldn't mathematically account for.
00:51Which is why they turned to black holes, detailing instead that the light coming from the LRDs
00:55was actually from the accretion disk which surrounds them, and not stars.
00:59There are still quite a few mysteries surrounding these red glowing spots in space, with experts
01:03saying it's a continuous exchange between models and observations, finding a balance
01:08between what aligns well between the two, and what conflicts.