In the 50 years since the first black hole was spotted, astronomers have discovered millions of these objects, so dense that their gravity prevents anything, even light, from escaping.

Black holes occupy places where dying stars collapsed, drifting through the universe and sitting at the heart of most large galaxies, including our own. Despite their ubiquity, the way different types of black holes grow and evolve remains a mystery.

“They are everywhere in our universe, but we still don’t know how they are formed,” said Sunmyon Chon, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

In a study published in Nature, Chon describes a simulation of the early universe that links black hole formation with a phenomenon that has become a topic of debate in astronomy: so-called little red dots.

The simulation shows that massive black holes might form naturally from the chaotic swirls of material available in the early universe. As the holes rapidly pick up that material, Chon’s team found, their light emissions appear like the little red dots astronomers see today.

Little red dots, first seen through the James Webb Space Telescope and mentioned in a 2023 draft paper, are a series of red-tinted objects that date back to one billion years after the Big Bang. They’re tiny, each taking up about one pixel in the telescope’s photos, but also common.

Many astronomers initially thought that the dots might be the bright cores of extremely massive galaxies from the early universe. But now that many more observations and studies have been completed, most scientists agree that the dots are black holes of some kind and that the red lights are clouds of dust being sucked inside.

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