The Little Red Dots That Turned Out to Be Black Holes in Disguise

For three years they've been one of the strangest puzzles in astronomy. Tiny, mysterious red dots scattered across the early universe, so abundant and so bright that some researchers wondered if they had "broken" cosmology itself. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed look yet at one of them, and the answer it reveals is as exotic as the name suggests: a star sized object that is, in fact, a black hole wearing a disguise.