I knownot only is the name highly unimaginative, it also conveys a false impression of insignificance.
In reality, these little red dots almost broke modern cosmology.
Were confounded by this new population of objects that Webb has found.
Little Red Dots.© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College)
Redshifthappens when the universes expansion stretches light waves, increasing their wavelengths.
This makes them appear more red because they shift closer to the red part of the light spectrum.
Thats partially why little red dots areyou guessed itred.
Essentially, lower redshifts correspond to closer distances in space.
Kocevski and his teams research was published in a Septemberpreprint articleon arXiv.
Nearly all the LRDs in their survey existed during the universes first 1.5 billion years.
How do we know about objects that existed billions of years ago?
Its because light takes time to travel.
For example, it takes eight minutes and twenty seconds for theSuns light to travelto our planet.
That means we see the Sun as it was eight minutes and twenty seconds ago.
The same goes for objects much farther away from us.
Dont worry, there wont be a quiz at the end.
The most exciting thing for me is the redshift distributions.
It would also fix the cosmology that the JWST broke when it first identified the LRDs.
Light emitted by AGNs, however, fits with those theories.
While the universe-breaking problem might be solved, however, many questions about LRDs remain.
Theres always two or more potential ways to explain the confounding properties of little red dots, said Kocevski.
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