Since the Webb telescope started peering into the early universe in 2022, astronomers have been tantalized by mysterious Little Red Dots that pepper Webb’s images. Now, we might finally know what these dots are.

Researchers have announced that the Little Red Dots are a whole new type of astronomical object. They think these are black hole stars.

The Milky Way absorbed a large dwarf galaxy about 12 billion years ago, pushing the known history of major galactic mergers much farther back in time.

Hubble observations of ancient star clusters revealed a distinct population that could not have formed in either the early Milky Way or the later Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger.

The discovery gives astronomers a new way to reconstruct the Milky Way’s earliest growth and may help separate stars born here from those brought in by vanished galaxies.

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• Three actively feeding supermassive black holes appear to share one galaxy seen as it existed about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang.
• JWST detected their fast-moving hydrogen gas, including two central black holes separated by only about 190 light-years in projection.
• The system could help explain how early black holes grew so quickly and may represent an ancestor of mergers detectable by future gravitational-wave observatories.

• ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured an image of the recently discovered companion to the famous red supergiant Betelgeuse at its expected location.
• To confirm the object is Betelgeuse B astronomers will need to observe it in one year on the other side of the star.
• The likely companion star is around 2 to 3 times the mass of our sun.

• Astronomers found evidence that the Jellyfish Nebula, or IC 443, and the fainter remnant G189.6+3.3 may have formed from two massive stars that once belonged to the same binary system.
• Data from NASA’s Fermi telescope, eROSITA and other observatories show that both remnants lie about 6,000 light-years away, overlap in the sky and appear to interact with the same interstellar cloud system.

Astronomers know of three different categories of black holes. There are the supermassive black holes, which are the beasts that lurk at the centers of galaxies. There are stellar-mass black holes, which form after huge stars die. And then there are intermediate-mass black holes that fill the gap between those two.

The Milky Way and Andromeda have appeared locked on a destructive course for decades. Now, thousands of simulations suggest their collision is not destiny, but a contest between gravity, uncertain measurements and two smaller neighboring galaxies

The evidence for dark matter is everywhere and the evidence for dark matter is nothing. Galaxies rotate in ways that make no sense unless something invisible is adding mass. Light bends around galaxy clusters more sharply than visible matter alone could explain. Cosmological structure across the entire observable universe fits a pattern that requires most of its matter to be something that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light.

Faint, distant galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope are beginning to reshape how scientists understand the high-energy universe. These compact objects, known as “Little Red Dots,” may hold clues to one of astronomy’s longest-standing mysteries, the origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos.

Quasars are actively feeding supermassive black holes, blasting so much radiation into space that they’re visible billions of light years away. These are just some of the objects that ESA’s Euclid mission is seeing as it completes its survey of the large scale structure of the Universe, measuring the influence of dark matter and dark energy over time. Recently, the mission turned up dozens of previously unseen quasars at high redshifts, including the farthest ever seen at z=7.7, seen at a time when the Universe was only 680 million years old.