When the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) became operational in 2022, it opened a new window to celestial bodies not yet seen by human beings. Webb can look back in time approximately 13.5 to 13.7 billion years—nearly to the edge of the Universe as we know it— capturing light from the universe’s very first generation of galaxies formed just 290 to 300 million years after the so-called “Big Bang,” according to NASA. It relayed images of hundreds of groups of galaxies at the very edge of its limits, called, “Little Red Dots.”
Scientists have been puzzling over these objects since they were discovered; red, small and compact, and many of them held a black hole at its center. They were estimated to be on average about 2 percent of the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy, or about 2,000 light-years across.
Our telescopes can detect emissions from the universe that range from the very large (radio waves can be as large as 100 km. in length) to the minute gamma rays (about 0.01 nanometers or 0.1 angstroms in wavelength). Depending on the type of wavelength used to observe the Little Red Dots, they appeared to be different—sometimes depicting a galaxy dense with stars, or a supermassive black hole.
