Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are JWST's little red dots?

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Daniel and Kelly talk about the James Webb Telescope and something mysterious it sawSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The reason we do experiments is because we want our intuition, our expectation to be confronted by reality. That's why we build particle colliders and telescopes to force the universe to reveal its secrets to us. And just about every time we commission a new telescope, every time we look out into the universe with new kinds of eyeballs, we see something new, something surprising,

something that confounds our expectations and clashes with our understanding. Those are the best moments because they herald some new idea, some new revelation, some new understanding of how the universe, works, something potentially groundbreaking about our cosmos. So when we launched the James Webb Space Telescope, I was very excited for what it might reveal, and we have not been disappointed. Today we'll dig into one of the first, grandest, and long-standingest mysteries revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily surprising universe. I study parasites and space, and I have two telescopes, one of which I cannot figure out how to use, and one of which I can and I love it.

And what kind of things can you see through your telescope? The moon and big stuff. Through your neighbor's windows. No, no, no, no, no. You can't see any of my neighbor's windows from where I live. All right. I'm not creepy. I guess in Virginia, people respect their privacy.

That's good to hear. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist from California, and I study particles and aliens. And I own zero telescopes. You own zero telescopes. Well, I guess, you know, in California, it can be hard to get away from the light pollution. But there's some parts of California where you can get away from the light pollution, probably. It's easy for me here in Virginia.

We have different kind of stars here in California, just glittering human beings. Oh, yeah, I know. but lots of plastic surgery and stuff. It takes a lot of money to get that glitter. California glam does have its downsides. Well, I don't want to be so negative about California. But my question for you is, today we're talking about an amazing new-ish telescope that we have. Out of the amazing telescopes that have been proposed, if you could make any of them appear,

which one would you like to have exist? Oh, great question. Well, first of all, of course, we should build all of them. We should build a thousand space telescopes. I can't believe that we have the technology. We have the money. We have people eager, you know, chomping at the bit to build these things, to run them for us, to send us incredible pictures from around the universe. We're just deciding not to.

We're spending it on other stuff instead. To me, that's insane. But anyway, if I could only build one of them, I think I would build the Habex. This is the habitable exoplanet observatory, and it's designed to directly image planetary systems around sun-like stars. And you know, I want to see those aliens. And to me, it's incredible that we can get like pictures of planets around other stars, not artist's conceptions, right? Not imaginations. Actual photographs of planets around other stars.

Oh my gosh, I can't wait. Build the thing. Now, today, launch it yesterday. Could you look in alien windows? Because clearly that's what you want to do. Yes, I do want to look in alien windows. And frankly, if I could, I would. Wouldn't you? I don't know. I don't think that would be a good start to your alien relationship to be peeping through their window. Hey, you don't know what it means in alien cultures. Maybe that's very respectful. A compliment? A compliment?

A compliment? Yes, exactly. Yes. This is how you show you're interested in someone. Don't project your Virginia foibles on aliens. We don't know. No. All right. Hey, DQAU listeners, don't show you're interested in someone by looking through their windows. Just for young listeners, that's not acceptable. Solid advice when applied to humans. Yes, I agree.

But no, HabX can't see through alien windows. There's a limit, the diffraction limit. So unless we have really big lenses like the size of the sun, then we can't image details on exoplanets. But, you know, it can characterize their atmosphere. It can understand how much ocean there is, how much land there is. it's going to look at the spectrum of those planets and really understand habitability, which I think would be super fascinating.

Yeah, that would be awesome. I would like to have that telescope too. But, you know, we don't want to sit here being too bummed about the telescopes we don't have. Well, we did somewhat recently get this amazing telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. And yes, it was over budget and behind schedule, but we have it. And now it's giving us amazing data. Yeah, that's right.

It's incredible. what we build as humans. You know, when I see something like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Chrysler building or something, I'm just floored at the complexity and the scale of projects that humans can pull off, like over budget, behind schedule, whatever. The thing is in space taking pictures of the universe. It's incredible, right? Like mind-blowing that we pulled it off.

And the James Webb is working really, really well. It's sending us beautiful images of the universe. And I am just always excited about any time we build new technological eyeballs to expand our ability to look at the universe because the universe is out there doing its thing and screaming information at us. So many photons are coming towards the planet all the time with gobs and gobs of information about the early universe, the late universe, what's happening here, what's happening over there. Most of it is just being ignored. Imagine the universe was emailing you answers to physics problems, and you were just like deleting it or just like not reading your email. That's basically what we're doing. We capture the tiniest of tiny fractions of photons that come to Earth filled with rich information about the deepest secrets in the universe.

And, you know, most of them just like splash on a concrete or get ignored. So that's a bummer. And I'm excited about every time we capture them. And history tells us that every time we do, we learn something mind blowing, something incredible. something incredible about the universe. Daniel, what if there are aliens trying to write you letters? And we're missing them. They're trying to say hello to you in particular.

Oh, man, make it personal, Kelly. Sorry. They're like, Daniel, we have answers to all of your questions. You're stressing me out. Okay, all right, let's move on, let's move on. Alien listeners, however, please do write to us questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. Send us your questions, send us your answers. Please, email us.

Daniel is listening. I will right back to the aliens. He will. But in the meantime, today we're discussing something that James Webb Space Telescope has already found, has already blown the minds of astronomers, has already led to years-long debates and confusion about what happened in the early universe. That's right. And it's something that we didn't expect we were going to see.

And it sounds like candy. Oh, you say it sounds like candy. But let's go ahead and listen to what the extraordinaries had to say when you ask them, what are the little red dots? Because candy is not what they had on their minds. James Webb Telescope is infrared. So maybe the dots have got something to do with warmer areas in space. I think they were small galaxies or nebulas that were forming stars way earlier than expected after the Big Bang. Maybe they are far, far away stars getting further away faster and faster ever. Or maybe it's just measles.

Zombie black holes. They're probably not red dwarves because they're too small. So maybe something bigger than that could be hocking radiation. Maybe those little red dots are like the dots at the top of some web pages. that open up a menu of options, but this time it's about the origin of the universe. I'm ashamed to say that I saw something about little red dots on Instagram, but I didn't admit the description.

Galactic anti-vexers and their space measles. Could they reread stars? Objects in the very early stage in the formation of the universe that are like proto-galaxies or something, but I don't think we're sure. Is it some type of lensing, Well, if it's red and little is probably redshifted and a long, long way away. And since it's James Webb, I'm guessing something record-breaking. Evidence of large galaxies much earlier than our current theories allow.

Or the teenage universe just had really bad skin. The most distant galaxies discovered so far. Well, now the extraordinaries were speaking right to Kelly's heart because they weren't thinking about candies. They were thinking about infections. Came up more than once. And, you know, maybe we should have an episode on measles too. We'll see. But, yes, so how close were these answers?

There's some good answers in here. You know, there's stuff in here about the early universe, things that are redshifted. That's pretty solid. And clearly some people had heard about this mystery. Yeah. And I'm going to be honest, I have been sort of, like, living in a cave with my fingers in my ears, not paying attention to the news. I had not heard about the little red dots.

And so I'm excited to have you tell me about them today. Yeah. All right. Well, let's start out by reminding ourselves what is the James Webb Space Telescope and what can it see? Because that's going to turn out to be really important to understand how it sees the universe, what it can see, what it cannot see. All right. So when did we get this new tool? Yeah.

So December 2021, this thing launched on a rocket out into space. And James Webb Space Telescope, very powerful, very awesome. but it's not like a descendant of Hubble or replacement for Hubble. It's more like a compliment to Hubble. Hubble is an optical telescope, meaning that it mostly is good at seeing light in the visible spectrum. Remember, light is just electromagnetic radiation. It comes in all sorts of frequencies from infrared and radio waves

with very low frequencies, long wavelengths, up to the visible spectrum where we are used to seeing light, and then up beyond it into the ultraviolet, the x-rays, the gamma rays, where you have very high energy, very short wavelength, very high frequency. There's a huge spectrum of radiation, and different parts of the universe, different stuff in the universe at different temperatures and different chemical compositions, absorbs or emit at different frequencies. So if we want to look at the universe, we should try to look at lots of different wavelengths. So Hubble is really, really good at seeing in the visible. James Webb Space

Telescope is designed to see in the long wavelengths, in the in the... for a red, well below what the human eye can see. Okay, so Hubble can see the stuff that we could see, but obviously can, like, see stuff way farther out and way better than we can with our naked eyes. Yes. And James Webb Space Telescope is seeing stuff that our eyes couldn't detect at all. That's right. And remember that telescopes are really good because their lenses are big, and so they gather more

light than your eyeball. Like, if you put the Hubble someplace versus your eyeball, the Hubble can see more distant things because it's gathering more photons. Imagine some super-duper far away galaxy. It's shooting out photons in all directions. If you're 10 billion light years from that galaxy, then those photons get spread across a sphere whose radius is 10 billion light years. Imagine the size of that sphere. All the photons get spread across that sphere. The further away you are, the larger that that sphere is. That's why the intensity of sources goes like one over the distance squared, because the area that sphere is 4 pi r squared, right?

The three-dimensional nature of our universe is the reason for the inverse square law, which I always thought was super cool connection to geometry. Anyway, the bigger your lens, the bigger your eye, the bigger your telescope, the more of those photons you're going to capture, so you're better at seeing more distant things. Also, as we talked about recently, there's the diffraction limit that tells you, can you resolve whether this photon came at this angle or a slightly different angle? And that depends on the wavelength,

and also on the size of the lens, crucially. So bigger lens means see more distant things and get better resolution on them. Things go from blurry to crisp. So that's why we build these things to have as big mirror as possible. Hubble is 2.4 meters across the light gathering thing. James Webb, 6.5 meters across. It's huge. Remember those iconic hexagonal mirrors that I think even appear in the logo for James Webb? That's the reflecting surface. and that's why it's so big. That's over 21 freedom units, over 21 feet. That's huge.

That's like three of my dad standing on top of each other. That is a big lens. It is. It's a big mirror. Yeah. And if you remember, it's gold. And the reason it's gold is because James Webb is looking for red photons, long wavelength photons in the infrared.

Gold is really, really good at reflecting in the infrared. And so the thing is out there, it's looking for red photons, it's made of gold. And the reason we're looking for red photons is that things that are really, really far away are moving away from us very quickly. And that means that their light is red shifted. So we talk about red shift as a measure of velocity. Because there's a close connection between velocity and distance, you can also use redshift as a proxy for distance.

So astronomers often saying something at redshift 3.4, something at redshift 3.4, something at redshift 7.9, what they mean is a distance. They're using us as a way to talking about distance. And if you're interested in the early universe and you're interested in stuff that's really, really old, really far away, that stuff's all going to be super redshifted. Even if it emitted originally in the visible, you had a star, it emitted visible light, now it's moving really, really far away. That light is super redshifted. And so we need an infrared telescope in order to see it. So James Webb is designed to see deep into the universe the old reddest light, stuff that happened just after the Big Bang.

Okay. And by putting it out in space, it doesn't get distracted by all of the light that we have here on Earth, right? Is that why we put it in space? We put it in space for a few reasons. One is, yeah, life pollution here on Earth. The other is the atmosphere. Like, you don't want to be looking through an atmosphere. Atmospheric images because the atmosphere has density fluctuations. As light passes through the atmosphere, if a little pocket of air is slightly more dense than another one, it's going to deflect the light, act like a lens. So you have layers and layers of that happening. You have all these atmospheric distortions. And so ground-based telescopes, it's easy to build them like 50 meters across or easier at least than space stuff because you don't have to launch them, right?

But they suffer from atmospheric distortions. They can compensate for that using this awesome laser technique where they shoot a laser up into the sky so they can measure the distortion and then they can compensate for it in real time. They have these actuators that bend the mirror on the telescope in real time, like super fast, like many times a second to compensate for it. It's like science fiction. It's incredible what these nerds have come up with. I love nerds. The other reason it's out in space is that to see infrared, you need to be very, very cold. Remember that there's a connection between color and temperature. It's the black body radiation connection. Things that are colder tend to radiate longer wavelengths. So the sun radiates in the visible spectrum because of its

atmospheric temperature, 5,500 Kelvin, and so it radiates in the visible. If things cool down, like the Earth, tends to radiate in the infrared. Anything that's around our temperature is going to radiate in the infrared. So if you're a telescope that's gathering infrared light, you don't want to be near sources of infrared light, like the Earth, and you don't want to be yourself a source of infrared light, right? You don't want to make a telescope out of glowing things, for example. And so they send it out in space so it can be far from the earth so that it can stay cold and it can stay dark. So it's got a sunshade and it's cooled to negative 233C. Whoa.

What is that in freedom units? Super cold. It's super cold in freedom units. That's negative 387 Fahrenheit. And so it's not out in space like, or. orbiting the Earth. They want to keep it even further from the Earth. It's at L2, this Lagrange point, where you can be stable relative to the Earth and the Sun. That means that the Earth is constantly between James Webb and the Sun. So it's like further from the Sun, but it can still be

stable relative to the Earth and the Sun. It's not actually at L2, it's orbiting L2 because you could have multiple things at L2. You don't want them crashing into each other. Does it take any energy to make it orbit L2 or it just does that on its own and keeps going? It just does that on its own. It's a stable location. It's very cool. That is cool. And you can even turn the telescope without using any like reaction mass because it has these reaction wheels. The way that works is that the telescope turns one way and the reaction wheel turns the other way, then there's no net angular momentum on the telescope. And so you can turn it without like firing a thruster. It does also have thrusters for like corrections or whatever, but you want to be very, very special. And so you want to be very

bearing and how you use those because you can't refuel, right? Anything that's using up a resource that can't be replenished is going to be limited time. So they use a reaction wheels to point it, and they use the thrusters only when needed. Okay, so this sounds absolutely massive. So I'm guessing that we couldn't build it full size, completely, like open and ship it up like that. So how did we get this giant thing to space and like open it up? Yeah, that part is incredible. As you say, you can't just build the thing in space where we can't do.

do that yet. And you can't build it just like completely on the ground in perfect conditions and then ship it up because there's a limit on the size of things you can launch, right, which is the size of the rocket. So they designed it to fold up. So we could go inside this rocket and then go out into space, get to the right location and unfold. And that was a very nerve-wracking moment, right? When it launched and it didn't blow up, yay. And then it got to its location and it unfolded correctly. Really amazing, a piece of engineering. And, you know, there's no way to recover this. thing or to fix it, right? Remember, it's at L2, which is not close to Earth. It's much further than the moon, for example. And like, no astronaut has ever gone much further than the moon. And so

we're not like sending somebody to repair it like we did with Hubble. This thing is just out there and inaccessible. Yeah, I imagine that must have been absolutely petrifying because we did have to fix Hubble right when it went out there. There was a problem with the lens. And I remember reading Mike Massimino's biography and he was talking about going out there to fix it. And so I can imagine the first images that we looked at from the James Webb Space Telescope, that must have been a pretty tense moment, like, but there's no going back. I know. You spent your whole career designing this thing, and one thing goes wrong, it can all just be for naught, right? Yep. And then you know also, you're endangering future missions, right? If you waste $10 billion, like, it makes it pretty hard

to ask for another space telescope. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot on the line, but these folks dreamed big and they delivered. It's amazing. It's been working really well. So, far. It's got enough fuel for like 20 years. They planned for like 11 years, but because they launched it so accurately and they didn't have to have like a lot of course corrections along the way, they think that it's going to have enough for 20 years of like small corrections. Way to go, NASA. Exactly. But we still have to spend like the first few months of James Webb Space Telescope's lifetime, like aligning the mirrors, getting everything perfectly crisp, right? Because you know the thing unfolds and then you have to like tweak it and adjust for it and this hard. things there and software things there. But now we have it and it's out there and it's gathering infrared light about the early universe and about exoplanets because red light comes not just from bright stuff, which is now redshifted. It also comes from things that just originally emit in the infrared like planets, right? The Earth emits in the infrared. You emit in the infrared.

Your neighbors are emitting in the infrared out their bathroom windows. And so James Webb Space Telescope is good at seeing things in the infrared, which means it's good for seeing like planetary formation and protoplanetary disks and exoplanet. It's not in the visible, but in the infrared. All right, everyone, we're going to take a break. And I'm going to have a little chat with Daniel about why all of these references to looking into people's windows are really creepy. And I'm going to try to make sure that Daniel doesn't dwell too hard, thinking about all the messages he might have missed while the James Webb Space Telescope was getting calibrated early on. And when we come back. We're going to talk about what we expected to see when the James Webb Space Telescope got turned on.

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or at least I've done what I can to try to make that happen. Holly, what if the aliens are expecting us to communicate with them via our bathroom windows? What if they've trained their telescope on our bathroom windows? And they're like, I don't see anything. These guys are just not interested in conversation. Then we just got to let them go, Daniel. We got to take that chance. Let them go.

No, unacceptable. Unacceptable. Daniel, you live in this world, play by this world's rules. Oh, my goodness. That's not the recipe for meeting aliens, Kelly. You've got to think outside the box and outside the window. It's the recipe for staying out of jail. Daniel. It's a good recipe. It's a good recipe. You know, if I'm willing to vaporize the planet to meet

aliens, I'm willing to risk prison. I think maybe we should just put you in prison, actually. We'd all be safer if you were there. But then we wouldn't get to enjoy your wonderful explanation. I wonder if you could do a podcast from prison, probably. Anyway, let's hope that never happens. I'm torn. But all right, so what did we expect to see? from the James Webb Space Telescope. So we were hoping to learn more about the early universe. Remember, James Webb is good at seeing the infrared, stuff that's really far away is redshifted.

We're seeing that far away stuff now because light has taken a long time to get to us from it, which means we're seeing really out-of-date information, but we're seeing from the early universe. So our goal was to see more about the early universe. And we have ideas about the early universe, but they were a little bit fuzzy. The basic picture of the early universe that we have is we start with some very hot, very dense, unexplained state.

Remember, the Big Bang does not include a singularity. It starts from a hot, dense state filling the whole universe, but it has tiny fluctuations in it. It's not perfectly smooth. So where you have a fluctuation that gives you higher density, you can have a little bit more gravity, and that tends to pull stuff towards it, and you get higher density and higher density. So there's a runaway effect. If the universe started out perfectly smooth, you would get no structure. But if there's little fluctuations and a lot of time, gravity will work to build those structures.

So you start from a primordial plasma, very hot and dense. Those fluctuations probably come from quantum mechanics. Gravity gradually builds up structure. And most of the universe is dark matter, right? Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, not visible matter, not hydrogen, not helium, but dark matter. And so it's really the dynamics of that dark matter that shape the structure of the universe. People often write to me about dark matter and they say, oh, it's just to fill in the gap of galaxy rotation curves, but it's so much more. We need dark matter at every stage of the universe.

Without dark matter in your model, you cannot explain how structure formed in the universe. There isn't enough time in the universe to pull together gas to make stars and galaxies in 14 billion years without the gravity of dark matter. So you need dark matter everywhere in the universe. It's definitely a thing, folks. It's not just a fudge factor. I'm over responding to a particular email I got this morning from the listener. That sounds surprisingly specific, but this is not the kind of thing that emits in the infrared, right? So James Webb Space Telescope would not be seeing dark matter, right?

That's right. Dark matter, we think, doesn't emit at all. But it shapes the structure that we do see, right? And so what you end up with is over-densities of dark matter, these gravitational wells that pull in gas. So you have huge clouds of gas where you have dark matter. So the gas tells you where the dark matter is, right? It's like a tracer. And then that gas collapses also for the same reason that you have little pockets of over density. And so you get collapse into stars. And the first set of stars then come together to form galaxies. The gas tells you where the dark matter is.

I think I heard the rest of what you said. But maybe. Maybe I didn't make it past that part. And whose mind is stuck in the bathroom now, Kelly? As long as no one's looking, I can keep it to myself, and that's fine. And so, you know, that's the rough picture of very early universe. And from there you get stars and galaxies, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But there's a lot of details that we didn't understand. For example, we didn't know for a long time, do you form big galaxies like the Milky Way,

which is huge, hundreds of billions of stars? Do you form that all at once? Like a bunch of stars come together to make a big galaxy? Is there like a monolithic collapse where you have a huge cloud of gas and they all form stars and boom, you have a galaxy? Or do small galaxies form and then merge, right? And so for a long time, people thought that galaxies formed big, right? Big monolithic collapse happened, that you have waves of star formation. But the new idea from observations of the early universe and from more distant galaxies is that there's a merger.

cycle, right, that you start with these early stars, these population three stars, terribly named population three. Oh, you guys. I know. The first stars were really, really big, like 100 to 300 times the mass of the sun and so big that they burned really hot and were really short-lived. And then they die and seed another generation of stars. And those come together to form small mini-galaxies.

And then galaxies merge to make big galaxies. So it's like a hierarchical formation of the galaxies. This is sort of what we expected. And so when we turned James Webb on, we were expecting to see a bunch of little galaxies before they emerged. You know, some irregular and some this and some that. But we're expecting to see early galaxy formation. Okay. And given how good you guys are at naming things, the galaxies were going to be like M1429, right?

As opposed to like, you know, Lisa Simpson or something amusing. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's a hard problem because there are lots of galaxies. Like, you cannot fathom how many galaxies we're talking about. If you hold up your finger at arm's length and point it up at the sky, then like the part of the sky blocked by your fingernail on your pinky, contains about a million galaxies. Wow. Your pinky fingernail, okay, there's a million in there.

So there's so many galaxies. And the deeper you look into the sky, the more you see. And the reason we talk about galaxies is because that's what the universe is made out of. That's basically the building block of the universe is galaxies. And also, we can't see individual stars mostly. Like, these galaxies are so far away that you can just resolve them. And you can see this galaxy, maybe a little bit about the shape, but you can't, like, zoom in on an individual star. Remember, there's still this diffraction limit.

There's a pixelization, even before we digitize our data, right? because the diffraction limit of optics, because we're talking about waves and there's interference when things come through an aperture. So there's a fundamental pixelization of the data we can see, so we can't resolve finer details,

which is why we study galaxies. And this was all true before the James Webb Space Telescope, or we're talking about the case now that we have the James Webb Space Telescope, we're still just looking at galaxies. We're still just looking at galaxies, and we were before James Webb.

Like Hubble's Deepfield, for example, is just like stare out into space and gather light for a little while and see what comes out into the dark bits. And the answer is galaxies. So many galaxies. Oh my gosh, galaxies. It's just galaxies everywhere. Which is amazing. And that's what we understood before James Webb turned on. And so we expected to like get more clarity on this picture. How are these galaxies forming? What do they look like? We also were wondering about the supermassive black holes. Remember that we see black holes in the early universe and we can see them because they're not. They're really, really bright. We call them quasars. They emit really powerful streams of light out of the center of the galaxies. And these quasars are really bright, which suggests the black holes are really big.

And this model we've talked about about gradually merging galaxies and then their black holes also merge can't account for the black holes that we already saw before James Webb. Like we saw these quasars, which means black holes that are really big, very early in the universe. This model of slowly building galaxies cannot get. you big enough black holes fast enough to explain the supermassive black holes we saw before James Webb. That's a longstanding mystery. Like what is the origin of the supermassive black holes in the universe? So we were hoping when we turned on James Webb to see some more clarity about this, their formation over there of the universe, how these things are coming together, what's going on? And, you know, they expected to see relatively faint, irregular proto-gal galaxies and a small

number of black holes forming over time. And so, you know, basically refine existing models. That's the sort of naive expectation. Oh, you physicist with your cute little ideas about how the world works. But, you know, we also were hoping to be surprised. That's sort of like your best guess based on the data. But the reason we build these things is not to refine our models and like dot eyes and cross-tees. We build these things to blow our minds. We build these things to explore the universe, right? We build these things because we don't want to rely on our intuition. We want to be confronted by reality. We want the universe to give up the ghost and say, okay, here's what's going on. Check out this crazy thing you never even imagined. You know, nobody imagined pulsars before we

discovered them. There's so many times we have looked out into the universe and seen something crazy that blew our minds and forced us to reimagine how we see the universe. And, you know, that's science at work. Science is not like, let's protect the dogma so I can keep getting my grant funding. Science is like, let's discover something crazy and new so I can get more grand funding. Right. No, you looked out into the universe and you saw job security because there's something we hadn't even thought of. No, I'm just kidding.

And it blew your mind. I totally agree. Exactly. Okay, so what did we see that was so surprising then? So we had this model, we thought we kind of knew what we were going to see, but we were hoping we'd also see something exciting. what was the exciting thing we saw? So we saw Little Red Dots. And that's why we're focusing on this for today's episode,

because these things were weird and unexpected. So what are little red dots? Well, they are literally, if you look at the James Webb Space Telescope images, they're little red and dotted, right? So they're bright, they're red, and there's a lot of them. So we've discovered a few hundred of them so far because we've only looked in a few places, but there's a lot of them relative to the number of galaxies we've seen.

You know, so like a few percent of the objects we've seen in the early universe are these little red dots. Huh. And are they in galaxies? Are they between galaxies? Are they randomly distributed? They are their own thing, right? And so people are wondering, like, are they a weird kind of galaxy? Are they an early stage of galaxies?

They were really strange. And nobody expected to see these things. Like maybe one or two if a galaxy got really weird, but they were really strange. There's just too many of these. And they formed really early in the universe. So we're talking about like 600 million years after that T-equal-zero moment when things were really hot and really dense. And then they went away. So by like a billion and a half years after the beginning of the universe, no more little red dots.

So these things are strange because they're really compact. They are very bright and very red. And also they have a really strange spectrum. Remember that when we're looking at something from the, or the universe, we can see it, and even though we can't always resolve spatial features, like we can't see, is there a bump on it, or like, what color is that window? We can look at the intensity at different wavelengths. So there's like this other dimension we can always do.

We'd like take the light and split it in a prism and ask, oh, how much red is there, how much green is there, how much blue is there, how much of this frequency? And usually we see like a peak somewhere based on the temperature. You know, like if you're looking at the earth from space, you would see. a peak at a frequency determined by a surface temperature. And when you look at a star, the same thing. You can tell the temperature of distant stars by looking at their peak. Or you see strong emission lines from some particular interaction, like black holes

tend to have really hot gas that emits x-rays. Or you see dust that absorbs at a certain frequency. These guys have a really weird frequency. It has a V shape in it. So it's like this broad emission at lower wavelengths and then a huge dip in the middle and then broad emission at higher wavelengths. So it's weird because it doesn't look like a young galaxy. It also doesn't look like a black hole.

It looks sort of like something new and weird with maybe like a cloud around it that's absorbing light at some frequency. So maybe something like shrouded in dust that we don't understand. What is it? Like, this is killing me? So, wait, okay, so, I mean, could it just be like

all the stuff sort of collecting and it's dusty and it's just very early. What's going on? So we have a few theories. And we're going to go to a break. And when we come back, Daniel will tell us about them. Pride is like love.

You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have part. party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate, love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere.

Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHartRadio.ca. Joy is essential and it's also elusive. You can't order it, you can't borrow it or simply hope it into life. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more. joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. Together, guys, we'll have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Entertainment legends, sports icons, wellness experts, and everyday people will share how they find, allow, and experience

joy. And I'll offer some of my own tips and takes on seeking a more balanced and harmonious life. If you're craving inspiration, support, and useful tools to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Joy after a breakup. Joy as an empty nester. Joy after a loss. Joy as a caretaker. This new podcast will speak to you. Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, listen up. The Jonas brothers here. Our podcast is called, Hey Jonas. We're here, since everyone has a podcast, we want it to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Nile.

It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast,

we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate it. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, Man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped, like, 30 albums. We dropped, like, five right now. Like, that's the rate we got to be going.

Yeah, that's a good attitude. You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers, like Fab Five Freddy. I directed when Nas' early videos. Which one? One love. Wow. Yes. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge.

His moms were still up in that apartment. Nause was just beginning to take off. His pops used to live near me in Harle. him. His dad introduced him to a whole lot of, you know, conscious stuff, and he made a young prodigy. No matter the era, Drinkchamps brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Mainstream media is full of crude depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We the End House is the podcast that's changing that.

I'm Theo Henderson, creator, and host. And for years, I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhouse parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQTIA plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. Weidian Houses a two-time Webby and Signal Award-winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wichler. A street doctor turned influencer

whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to Weythian House on the IHard Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, that break was particularly painful. Daniel, what do we think these? Little red dots are that appear to maybe be dusty clouds that emit at weird spectrum. Yeah, tell us.

What do we think they could be? So there's no theory that perfectly describes what we're seeing. But there's a bunch of proto theories. And I love that because what you're seeing, again, is science in action. You know, science is not done by developing perfect theories or waiting to publish until your theory is perfectly formed and describes the data. It's always work in progress. It's like, here's an idea. Here's how well it works.

here's the pros and the cons, right? And then there's an ongoing discussion or argument about as these theories develop, which one works best and eventually one of them wins out. And this is how science happens, right? No, seriously, friends, it's awesome that after an hour you don't get an answer. But no, really, this is how science works. Yeah, and so nobody knows the answer. One theory is that these are young galaxies, right?

And they're so unexpectedly bright because they're undergoing intense bursts of star formation. So these are called starburst galaxies. Because remember we talked about this giant cloud of gas and it's collapsing to form stars, if that happens all at the same time for like these mini galaxies, instead of having a mega collapse to the Milky Way, we start with mini galaxies. But if that's somehow coordinated across the galaxy, you have a bunch of stars all born at the same time, then you're going to get really bright emissions. That's the idea.

And this is a nice idea because it doesn't require you to invent some new thing in the universe. It's just like a new arrangement of stuff we all. already new. And it tries to explain this V shape in the spectrum, this dip in the middle of the spectrum by saying, well, it's not actually a dip. There's nothing that's being absorbed there. It's just that the edges are really bright. So the center looks like a dip. So instead of like subtracting away the center of the spectrum, they're enhancing the sides of the spectrum. I'm saying that comes from starburst formation. Okay. So it's not that it's dusty. Yeah.

It's just the message is getting thrown off because it's so bright. Yeah, exactly. So it looks like the center is suppressed, but it's really that the edges are enhanced. And that's why the center looks dimmer than the edges of the spectrum. Okay. So that's one idea. It's not a great theory because we don't understand how you form these galaxies so quickly. They're really bright.

The models of galaxy formation do not predict this so that you get these galaxies that are so bright and so intense and having these starbursts all at the same time. And the emission spectrums predicted by these theories don't describe this very easily. You don't get this kind of spectrum. So it's not a great fit. It's like, let's take the current idea of what we expected to see and try to tweak the knobs on it as much as we can to get it to describe it. And it's like, you can kind of get there a little bit, but it's really just not a good fit. And that's what's exciting, right? It's exciting because it suggests that, like, well, we need new ideas. Do we see other young galaxies anywhere?

Are we proposing that these red dots are a kind of young galaxy? Or is this like, we looked for young galaxies, we don't see them anywhere. And we're like, well, maybe this is what it is because we can't find them. Yeah. So that's the funny thing is that we do see some of those proto-galaxies, the ones that we expected, the regular clumpy shapes. They're like actively forming stars. They're not super compact.

They're normally bright. and we also, in addition, see these little red dots, the very compact, very red, very bright with a weird spectrum. So we don't just see what we expected. We also see these weird guys that we can't quite fit into the model. Huh. Okay. All right.

So then what else could they be? Well, there's a lot of excitement about black holes, right? Maybe these things are black holes forming early in the universe and then with a lot of dust around them. So like dust obscured black holes, maybe at the centers of very, very young galaxies. Remember that there's a mystery about where do the supermassive black holes in the universe come from? How did they get so big so fast? So maybe we're seeing those black holes being born.

And for some reason, there's dust around them that's making the dip in this spectrum, that's absorbing that light to suppress the center of the spectrum. That's one idea. How good is that idea? And every time you say supermassive black hole, does it also make you want to go to a muse concert? Oh, baby, don't you know I suffer? It really does have a rhythm to it, doesn't it? Supermassive black hole.

It's good because it explains why these things are small, right? Black holes are very, very dense. And why these things are bright. Black holes have really intense radiation because they heat up the stuff nearby. Remember, the black holes, not true. directly glowing, the accretion disk around them has a lot of friction and a lot of gravity, and that's the thing that gets really hot and glows. And so it explains that.

It also can explain the dip in the spectrum because you have a lot of dust there that's obscuring that part of the spectrum. But there's some problems with this theory. Like, number one, black holes tend to be really, really hot, and they tend to glow in the x-ray, right? Like, we see black holes out there. We've discovered some just by their x-ray emissions. They're very bright in the x-ray because of this.

hot gas, we do not see a lot of x-rays from these little red dots. And so that doesn't really fit with the black hole scenario. But there's a counter to that concern, which is James Webb can see in the infrared. It's not great at seeing the x-rays. And a lot of these places where we have imaged with the James Webb and we've seen these little red dots, we have not yet had a chance to point x-ray telescopes at these things. Right. So what you want is to see the sky in multiple frequencies. You want all of your telescope pointed at the same thing. So you see the infrared, you see the optical, you see the x-ray. That's really expensive. Even just getting time on the James Webb is a big deal. Getting also the Hubble or also Chandra or one of our X-ray telescopes to look at this thing, very challenging.

So definitely one thing to do is follow up on these little red dots using X-ray telescopes. But are the LRDs everywhere? The LRDs are everywhere. Yeah, they're distributed just like the galaxies are. Okay, but you just want to make sure that you're looking at the exact same spot that the James Webb was so that you can say, okay, we know that James Webb saw one here. Okay, got it. Exactly. Yeah. Another issue is that these things are weirdly uniform. Like they're all look about the same.

They're all the same brightness, et cetera. Whereas galaxies with supermassive black holes in them with active galactic nuclei, like emitting bright radiation, tend to be really variable. Like the fraction of the galaxy's mass that's contained in the black. hole is usually really, really small, but there's a lot of variation there. And we don't see that kind of variability among these little red dots, which is like, that's kind of weird. It's not a great fit for the black hole hypothesis. Also, these guys would be really, really massive. Like, we're talking about masses between 10 million and a billion of our son's masses. Very early in the universe. And it'd be really cool to see that. But again, we can't explain why that would happen.

There's no way to explain how you get a... a billion solar mass black hole this quickly in the universe. It's like trying to grow a, you know, a skyscraper from a seed in like a couple of days. There's just no explanation for it, which doesn't mean it can't exist. And that's exactly the kind of discovery everybody would love to make, right? But it makes you skeptical because it would be a really big discovery. The other issue is that this requires a lot of dust. You know, if you are going to quiet a very bright object in one part of the spectrum, you need a lot of dust to emit that. Remember, dust absorbs in certain frequencies because of its size, right? Really long wavelength stuff is going to go through the dust,

shorter wavelength. Things are like about the wavelength of the dust will interact with the dust and get absorbed. But if you do that, if the dust absorbs that energy, then it heats up, and you expect that dust to then glow in the infrared. So the hypothesis that, like, it's a black hole, which is emitting a lot of radiation and it's being shrouded by dust. Well, that dust should be heated up and you should be able to see that dust glowing in the infrared and we don't. So, you know, this is the kind of game you play. You come up with a hypothesis and then you make a prediction.

If this was true, we should see the dust glowing. Oops, we don't. Uh-oh. So that's like not a check mark for that theory. Okay. So is now when we talk about this possibly being a message from aliens? You know, I'd love for it to be a message from aliens, but they're everywhere, right? It's not like here's one system where something is going on.

It's something very early in the universe where it's hard to imagine, you know, intelligent technological life already forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. You know, Earth came fairly late in the universe. We didn't form until, you know, five billion years ago or so in a 14 billion-year-old universe. So you could imagine arguing that you could have intelligent life earlier in the universe, but 500 million years after the Big Bang, that's pretty tough. It could be, though, right? I would love to be surprised.

But then it would also be ubiquitous, right? It's in every direction. That'd be pretty weird. But there are fun ideas about weird stuff that could have caused this. Like some people are arguing for direct collapse black holes. So instead of black holes where first you have a star, and then it burns out and then it collapses and to form a black hole when it runs out of its fusion fuel, just go straight to a black hole, right?

Enough gravity to overcome any fusion pressure or any degeneracy pressure straight to a black hole. Nobody's ever seen this. It's very speculative, very theoretical. It would explain super massive black holes, right? Because that's a theory for how you get so big, so fast, is that you use an accumulation method that we haven't considered. right, going straight to a black hole and not wasting time glowing for a few hundred million years. That doesn't sound like a good use of time. It would be kind of awesome, but it feels like it should be rare.

Like the calculations suggest that it shouldn't happen very often. And so it's hard to use this to explain so many little red dots. But again, we're looking for surprises. We're looking to learn. So you can't throw out an idea because it conflicts with your previous theories. You're hoping to conflict with your previous theories. But you know, you have to find a way to make it work. You also can't just say, oh, this doesn't agree with my theories, therefore it's true, right?

You have to find a new explanation. You have to find a coherent, holistic theory that explains what we're seeing. So direct collapse black holes could explain supermassive black holes in the early universe if we find a way to make them more common. Another idea is that maybe we're seeing exotic or super massive stars. Remember, we talked about the first stars in the universe being Population 3 stars, these really massive, very short-lived stars. Nobody's ever seen these because they lived very, very briefly. It's just a few million years or tens of millions of years.

And we can't resolve individual stars in early galaxies. So nobody's ever seen directly Population 3 stars. They're only theoretical. And so it could be that these are Population 3 stars, very early star formation, but much of more massive than we expected, maybe like up to a million solar masses. Wow. There's like a limit on the size of a star, sort of surprisingly, above 250 or 300 solar masses. The interior gets so hot and the fusion happens so fast that the star basically blows itself

apart. And those are the limits theoretically. And we've never seen a star bigger than that. But you know, early in the universe, stars made mostly of hydrogen, maybe up to a million solar masses, the models people have developed for this kind of match the spectrum that you've seen. Epic. You know, it's like the photosphere of this star is predicted to give sort of a V shape in the spectrum, which would be really awesome.

And it could help explain supermassive black holes. But, you know, this is very, very speculative stuff. And the models are still a very approximate. As you develop an idea, you first describe it simply and then you improve it iteratively. You know, as time goes on, you have more energy, more resources. And so the models are still very early in development. And it could be that as we make them more realistic, they drift away from describing the data rather than towards it.

We don't know. But, you know, there are people out there working on this stuff and maybe they're right. Awesome. And so so far, we've only talked about stuff that we've already thought about, but just we're thinking about it a little bit differently. Do you think it's possible the answer could be something completely out of the box? Absolutely. You know, we are doing our best.

to describe something new, but it's been years already, right? These LRDs were seen very early in the James Webb Run, and we have not explained them yet. And so the first thing you've got to do to be conscientious is like try to find a more prosaic explanation, but at some point you've got to be more creative and come up with like new things that might be able to describe what we're seeing.

And the best way to do that is to get more information. Look at these things in the radio using Alma. Look at these things in X-ray scans. try to figure out what this means. This also could be a harbinger of things to come. Like the James Webb Space Telescope is great, but it can basically only see bright things in the early universe. It could be that this is just like the tip of the iceberg

and the early universe is filled with all sorts of stuff we never imagined. We're only seeing the brightest ones because that's what we're capable of. But maybe future telescopes will be able to resolve dimmer things that are even weirder. So, yeah, there's a lot of, potentially exciting stuff. The fact that this mystery has survived this long suggests we have a lot to learn about the early universe either way. Give more money to telescope people. More eyes on the sky, absolutely. You had to make it sound kind of creepy, didn't you? No, that's not creepy. That's just being open-minded. That's just accepting the information the universe is sending us, man. Save it for the judge.

All right, I'm happy to be prosecuted in the Universal Court of Knowledge Gathering, you know, as long as I have my alien lawyer with me to explain to narrow-minded humans who can't think beyond their parochial Virginia ethics. Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, I will be waving at you from the freedom outside your cell, and maybe we'll still be able to record twice a week. But this was awesome. I hope we figure it out.

your money on one of the things that we've talked about today. Which one do you think it is? Something black hole-y for sure, because there's already a lot of black hole mysteries in the early universe. Okay. And, you know, maybe this is just connecting the dots between two things that are weird, but I feel like we never really understood early universe black holes. Now we're seeing something new in the universe. We don't really understand. Maybe they're connected. Oh, little red dots. How long before you tell the truth. I had to get some mused in there.

No, I'm so sorry. Let's get that out. No, that was great. Matt, had some musical accompaniment, Alberta. Oh, no. All right. Thanks, everybody. Until next time.

Keep your eyes on the sky. Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really. is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. Come engage with us. You can email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you.

And you can find our website, www.danaulandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thanks for joining us. Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kot Me.

If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. All right, listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called, Hey Jonas. We're here, since everyone has a podcast, we wanted to as well.

And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It was the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done.

You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is Michael Rappaport, and my podcast, the I Am Rapaport Stereo podcast, is unlike anyone you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid, Jafar Jackson, should absolutely positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am Rap Report on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. For years, the unhoused have been presented as a monolith in mainstream media. We'd-en-house is a podcast that's changing the narrative.

I'm Theo Henderson, and I created the show why I was unhoused on the streets of Los Angeles. We've grown into a two-time Webby Award-winning podcast. The only podcast that shares unhoused stories and news from the Un-Houx. Howes' perspective. Listen to Wey and Howe's on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are?

I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got, like, so much more to do. Like, Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we got to be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.