Are the Little Red Dots Actually Black Hole Suns?

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 body that may have just dropped, what some astronomers are calling “black hole stars.”This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.   Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor-in-chief Samir Patel and Senior Editor Hannah Waters speak with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math. This week's coda is a sonification of data from a device known as the NIRSpec integral field unit on NASA's Webb telescope. Here, the pitch of the sound represents the velocity of hydrogen gas moving around the black hole. The higher the pitch, the faster it is moving toward the telescope. This data enabled the first direct mass measurement of a black hole from the first billion years of the universe. Coda Credit - Sonification: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Christopher Britt (STScI), Ralf Crawford (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Margaret Carruthers (STScI); Science: Ignas Juodžbalis (Cambridge), Cosimo Marconcini (University of Florence), Roberto Maiolino (Cambridge), Francesco D'Eugenio (Cambridge), Hannah Übler (MPE)