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.
Comments