Are the Little Red Dots Actually Black Hole Suns?

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When all you can see is a speck, it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at. Astronomers first argued that little red dots spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022 were distant galaxies on the cosmic horizon, mainly because of their brightness. Later, they concluded that little red dots look more like the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of most galaxies. But in the spring of 2025, two teams of astronomers simultaneously announced observations of a pair of little red dots that were unlike all the rest. In fact, they were unlike any object ever seen. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Charlie Wood to talk about the new celestial…