Mysterious ‘little red dot’ galaxies have a possible origin story

The early universe is speckled with little red dots, and now we may have an idea of how these peculiar galaxies originated: They were born with almost no spin.

Little red dots were totally unknown until their discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope, which revealed a tiny galactic species that proliferated when the universe was only 640 million to 1.5 billion years old. These galaxies are compact because they were barely rotating when first taking shape, Harvard astronomers Fabio Pacucci and Avi Loeb report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.