The mysterious “little red dots” (LRDs), first detected by the JWST space telescope, long remained one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics. Now, thanks to detailed digital modeling on Japan’s ATERUI III supercomputer, scientists have managed to reveal their nature. It turns out that these objects are rapidly growing black holes. Therefore, no exotic assumptions are needed to explain their existence.
For a long time, astronomers could not understand how supermassive black holes, with masses millions and billions of times greater than that of the Sun, could have appeared so quickly in the early Universe — less than 600 million years after the Big Bang.
The launch of JWST was expected to provide answers to these questions. Because light takes a finite amount of time to travel across cosmic distances, observing objects 11–12 billion light-years away allows us to see the Universe as it existed billions of years ago. Instead of simple answers, however, the space observatory discovered a new population of faint, distant, and extremely red objects that became known as “Little Red Dots.”
Modeling on ATERUI III
To solve this mystery, an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics used the ATERUI III supercomputer located at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Its enormous computing power made it possible to carry out the most detailed simulation to date of processes in the early Universe, ranging from the global conditions around the first galaxies to processes inside individual gas clouds.
The results of the study, published in Nature, showed that intense ultraviolet radiation from neighboring galaxies dominated at that time. It suppressed the normal formation of large numbers of small stars inside gas clouds. Instead, the gas condensed into a single supermassive star, which later collapsed and created the seed of a black hole.
A Natural Explanation Without Exotic Physics
After forming, such seeds found themselves surrounded by extremely dense gas disks. This environment trapped internal radiation, allowing the black holes to grow tens of times faster than would be possible in the modern Universe.
The modeled physical properties of these objects fully match the observed parameters of the “little red dots.” This discovery gives astronomers a clear and straightforward roadmap for understanding how the cosmos evolved during the earliest stages of its existence.
According to Phys
