Mysterious little red dots may be cocooned black holes

Deep in the early universe, astronomers have identified a class of objects known as little red dots that seemed to defy standard cosmic models. These objects appeared in large numbers roughly 600 million years after the Big Bang but mysteriously vanished by the time the universe was two billion years old. New data from the James Webb Space Telescope suggests these dots are actually black hole stars, which are supermassive black holes growing rapidly inside a thick cocoon of partially ionized gas.