Astronomy

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Computers built with analogue circuits promise huge speed and efficiency gains over ordinary computers, but normally at the cost of accuracy. Now, an analogue computer designed to carry out calculations that are key to AI training could fix that

Computers built with analogue circuits promise huge speed and efficiency gains over ordinary computers, but normally at the cost of accuracy. Now, an analogue computer designed to carry out calculations that are key to AI training could fix that

Experiments suggests H9N2 has adapted to human cells, but cases of person-to-person transmission haven’t been reported yet

Black holes are eating each other and growing fat on the remains! They then seem to move on, finding new partners to devour in what can only be described as a cycle of violence. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have caught these “second generation" black holes in the act, one spinning so fast it ranks among the most extreme ever observed, the other rotating backwards. These aren't simple collisions between black holes born from dying stars, instead they're the products of earlier mergers now colliding again in crowded stellar neighbourhoods, carrying the scars and strange spins of their violent pasts into the fabric of spacetime itself.

New instruments bring new mysteries, and when James Webb came on line it uncovered a collection of strange, compact, bright objects shifted deeply into the red end of the spectrum. These were dubbed “Little red dots” or LRDs. And the astronomical community continues to puzzle over what they are. When JWST first peered into the distant past, it discovered the early universe had a rash of little red dots. Their existence just 450 million years after the big bang meant either galaxies were forming way faster than anyone predicted, or something unimagined had been found. 

Show Notes

• Excitement and anxiety astronomers feel when new telescopes like JWST come online.
• James Webb’s discovery of mysterious “Little Red Dots” — compact, bright, redshifted objects from the early universe.
• Possible explanations: active galactic nuclei (AGN), dust-enshrouded galaxies, or direct-collapse black holes.
• Debate over black hole growth limits, primordial black holes, and the Eddington limit.
• Theories on early galaxy and star formation, and what “Little Red Dots” reveal about cosmic dawn.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

AstronomyCast, Episode 769 Little Red Dots. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of the Universe Today.

With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I am doing well. It is the most glorious of falls here in Southern Illinois. The leaves are falling, the sun is out, it is hoody weather, I am happy, and Halloween is almost upon us.

Fraser Cain: 

So are you ready to feel a little bit self-conscious?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I guess.

Fraser Cain: 

So I was interviewing one of my patrons, and the patron said, hey did you ever notice that when Pamela says, I am doing very well, I’m like, no, you just did it. So apparently every time I ask you how you’re doing, you say, I, I am doing very well.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

That’s all right, I have habits.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah, crazy, like you just like, by the numbers, you did exactly on, so I had to bring it up. But the funny thing is that when we started doing this podcast, you actually asked me how I was doing, and I had to give the answer every time, and I hated it, and people made compilations of you asking me how I was doing, and me answering, and it all just sounding exactly the same, and so at some point I just flipped it on you, and you never complained. And so now, um, you, you are the one who I ask how you’re doing, and you always answer, and we’ve, you’ve never gone, wait a minute, why am I always the one who has to say how, how I’m doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So I think the switch happened, uh, not too different in time from when we switched how we were doing so many other things. This show has evolved.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

We went from just the two of us on Skype, uh, with both of us recording locally to Google Hangouts, to Google Hangouts on air, with you producing and going through myriad different technologies to, at some point it switched to me producing, and there’s been so many evolutions in there. We’ve also changed how, how we do the opening music, um, yeah, yeah. We’re almost to 800 episodes.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, you do, you do this many times, and you just, you fall into ruts and patterns, and so I’m like, I’m just glad people aren’t sick of us yet, that this is still what they want to listen to. So thank you for listening to us, and I know for some of you, uh, hearing us fall into these standard patterns of speech is your comfy place. This is, this is what you want to hear.

This makes you feel like the world is going to be all right, and for those of you who are annoyed, I’m sorry, that’s a Canadian sorry, nothing we can do. Um, new instruments bring new mysteries, and when James Webb came online, it uncovered a collection of strange, compact, bright objects shifted deeply into the red end of the spectrum. These are dubbed Little Red Dots, or LRDs, and the astronomical community continues to puzzle over what they are.

All right, take us back to the history, actually, before we do this, I want to talk like philosophically about your experience watching new telescopes come online, and what it’s like to be an astronomer knowing that the presents are about to be opened up.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So there is a Schrodinger’s box of emotion when new telescopes are coming online, and I feel it very deeply because of my experiences with my dissertation where an X-ray satellite I was planning to use failed on launch, and the Javier Burley telescope that I was planning to use to take hundreds of spectra allowed me to take 18 spectra. I’m very much aware that the telescope can fail spectacularly, or, or, if you’re very lucky, which I am not, it will be the best thing ever, and amazing new things will be discovered. And so this dichotomy of emotions as you wait for enough data to come in to fully understand what’s going to be possible is, I don’t even know how to articulate the internal dichotomy of I’m trying not to get excited, I’m trying not to get excited, I want to be excited, this could be everything, or we just wasted billions of dollars.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, it was funny, when the next generation telescopes came out from the European Southern Observatory with a very large telescope, we got the announcement of a whole bunch of new planets, new dwarf planets, and that was due to just the capability of that instrument, that more powerful instrument, new things happen. Some of the things, you get answers to the old questions, the whole point of building the telescope is to answer a bunch of questions. But the part that I enjoy even more is the new questions that pop up.

And so with James Webb, we knew there were going to be new questions, and there have been a bunch, but this is the one that I think has sort of best encapsulated what James Webb was supposed to do. And I think the answer is becoming more interesting over time as we’re seeing this. So let’s go back and sort of talk about this discovery of these little red dots for the first time.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So JWST took a series of different images to showcase what it’s capable of. These images included really pretty nebula that filled the entire field, and also background fields that included galaxies that were doing gravitational lensing, and just blank fields. Blank fields by which I mean not a gravitationally lensing galaxy cluster there, nothing is blank in astronomy.

And in those images that allowed us to see the background universe, there were these small red luminous objects that when you took their light and figured out roughly what red shifts they’re at, what time in the universe they’re shining their light at is from, and you adjusted their spectra, their rainbow of light back to what it would look like where they are, their rest frame magnitudes. They became these objects that were super bright in rest frame reds that had all sorts of hydrogen bomber light emissions and seemed to be hot and massive and they looked kind of like AGNs and they were just confusing. And so everyone just sort of went, but there aren’t supposed to be galaxies then, and then started doing research.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. And it turns out galaxies have been found then and even earlier, like we’re seeing galaxies at times that are less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. We’re seeing super massive black holes at times when the universe is less than half a billion years old.

We’re seeing spiral galaxies when the universe is less than a billion years old. The universe was surprisingly evolved, but these little red dots, okay, so those features you mentioned, they’re very bright, they’re very compact, they’re now shifted into the red. What kind of light were they giving off back in the day?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

They were the moral equivalent. So James Webb Space Telescope is seeing them in colors our eyeballs can’t even see. If you take that light, shift it to what our eyeballs can see, they would literally be red galaxies, but they’re not galaxies.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. Well, we don’t know what they are yet.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Probably. So to give some context, if one of these was plopped into our local group, they’d be roughly the same brightness as the Triangulum Galaxy and 3% of Triangulum or 2% the size of the Milky Way Galaxy. So these are very bright, very small from what we can see.

Fraser Cain: 

And very red. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So now think like an astronomer detective and put down all the pieces of evidence that we have so far that try to direct us towards what it is that these things might be.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So we’re seeing a bunch of different emission lines, which you get when you have a bright source shining its light through cooler gas that then has atoms that get excited into higher energy states. Nothing stays excited. And when they drop down to their lower energy level, they emit light.

Fraser Cain: 

Give us a sense of something that astronomers look at that has that phenomenon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So, when you have cooler gas around very hot stars, you see emission lines. Active galactic nuclei quintessentially have this pattern of lines. It’s these scenarios where you have something very hot giving off light surrounded by gas and dust that allows you to have this kind of emission line.

Fraser Cain: 

Okay. So we’ve got an active galactic nuclei. Like.

Hold on. Active galactic nuclei, case closed. Right?

No. Okay. So why can’t you just say it’s an active galactic nuclei?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So there’s other colors of light. And while we see emission lines and this V-shape in their spectrum that reminds us of active galactic nuclei, active galactic nuclei have other things like hot corona of gas around them that give off x-rays. And as hard as we look, we’re not finding x-ray emission from these little red dots.

It’s just not there. And by the way, I just need to warn people, do not Google little red dots without adding the word cosmology or JWST. Cosmology.

Fraser Cain: 

You’re just going to get rashes. You’re going to get rashes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And perhaps a suggestion that you go see your doctor. Yeah. Right. And this is the key, which is that you can take an active galactic nuclei, an actively feeding supermassive black hole. It’s feeding so heavily.

There’s so much gas coming in that material is piling around it. You’ve got this shroud of gas and dust around this central core. And yet because the accretion disk heats up, it’s giving off x-ray radiation.

Astronomers have looked at each of these objects with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, for example, and they’re not seeing the kind of x-ray emissions that you would expect coming from an active galactic nuclei. So active galactic nuclei off the table, case closed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So that means we have to come up with something else. And like I said, this is something, these are something, we’ve found over 350 of them now, that they exist in this window of time from about 300 million years after the Big Bang to about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. So this is a point in time where the diversity of elements in our universe wasn’t that great, when things were still in the process of forming.

And there’s a lot of problems that we want to solve with this era of the universe. And so people then go, I wonder if little red dots can solve this problem we have. And so the kinds of solutions that folks have looked at…

Fraser Cain: 

Well, what are the problems? Sorry, but you mentioned there’s a bunch of problems we’re trying to solve. What are those problems that we know of at the early universe?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So how do you get supermassive black holes that early? How big could stars get if they weren’t able to cool through metal lines? It turns out that heavy atoms provide ways for stars to do star things, and you can’t get massive stars if you have heavy elements in the stars.

So we have these two different problems that we’re trying to solve. We also have the, well, what if there were primordial black holes? What if things were happening with high turbulence in ways that we don’t think about in the early universe?

Fraser Cain: 

How did the dark ages end?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Right. And how did the dark ages end is something you can’t really solve with little red dots because it requires a lot of ultraviolet light. So the first thing we realized was, well, these don’t solve that.

And then the next question became, but what if they have a whole bunch of star formation? And then we started doing the weight. They’re like 3% the size of Triangulum, which is pretty small.

So where do you hide that much dust to enshroud star forming regions to hide the ultraviolet light? So that doesn’t work.

Fraser Cain: 

Well, hold on. So just like that line of thinking, right, is essentially you have stars compacted about as closely as you would see at the center of the Milky Way or in a globular cluster, and also with large amounts of dust and material all around them, like a super compact stellar nebula, like nothing we’ve seen in our nearby universe.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And one of the other problems that you run into with little red dots is they’re what’s called a super editing luminosity. This means that they aren’t in equilibrium between the amount of light going out and the amount of mass falling in. And so they don’t fit stars.

It’s this weird combination of things. So now we have to start saying, all right, so AGN is really, really close. It almost works.

We’re just missing the hot corona and some of the other details in the stellar spectra of a galaxy and the spectra of a little red dot don’t quite match. So is there a way to have essentially a naked AGN, something that doesn’t have that galaxy and that galactic halo around it? And that was the next place that people started looking.

Fraser Cain: 

And that would be weird. Yes. Right?

So you were talking about how instead of the traditional idea of a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, where it is maybe, I mean, right now the Milky Way’s black hole is only 10%. No, sorry. The Milky Way’s black hole is only 1%, maybe a 10th of a percent, I think, of the entire mass of the Milky Way.

Back in the early universe, they were more like 10%. So they were more dense, but still the black hole wasn’t the dominant mass in the Milky Way. It was the stars and the gas, the dust and the dark matter.

So, but in this case, we’re saying, well, maybe it was just a supermassive black hole and nothing else.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, a whole bunch of gas and dust.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And so the idea here becomes, and people are getting at this from multiple different directions. So I’ve seen papers that are like, okay, so let’s just imagine for a moment you could get a supermassive population three star that like collapses down and then all the density of material falls in towards it.

Can we create through turbulent infall of material a situation where you have a rapidly growing into a supermassive star with turbulent infalling material? I’ve also seen, well, what if you start with primordial black holes and you have turbulent infall of material? Right.

However you get the black hole, the idea is you have this supermassive black hole in a universe that it’s able to be a seed for gas to flow inward. That material is turbulent and because of the turbulence, it’s able to give off momentum in ways that we don’t normally think about when we watch things like toilets flushing and bathtubs draining. Turbulence allows this chaotic buildup of material around that supermassive black hole and all that material is now glowing like the disc of a AGN.

And in this scenario, which don’t let us name things, astronomers should never be allowed to name things.

Fraser Cain: 

And yet they keep doing it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, yeah. We need to like ask our kids, our spouses, our friends, just, yeah. I’ve seen two names pop up consistently.

One is quasistars where the idea is you don’t have, well, let me give both names. One name is quasistars and the other name, please don’t use this, please drop it forever, but you’re going to see it out there, is black hole stars, which is just leading people into a world of misunderstanding.

Fraser Cain: 

Isn’t a black hole a star?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No.

Fraser Cain: 

Gas?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So it’s a remnant.

Fraser Cain: 

It’s a remnant. Sure. Fine.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So stars, by definition, have nuclear reactions going on in their course.

Fraser Cain: 

What about a white dwarf?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

A white dwarf?

Fraser Cain: 

Star. White dwarf star. What about a neutron star?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, so those are stellar remnants that have terrible names. Yeah, I know. That’s all I’m saying.

Fraser Cain: 

That’s all I’m saying. It’s just like this, this is a barn with a lot of horses that are already running free.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I know. I know. I’m just trying to keep the last horse in the barn.

Fraser Cain: 

You are wasting your time.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I usually do.

Fraser Cain: 

Black hole stars. That’s what’s for dinner. That’s what we’re going to talk about now.

So I want to just sort of go back and sort of re-describe what you’re saying here, which is that, you know, there’s these two mechanisms, both of which are, which most people don’t think work. One is that you have a giant cloud of gas and dust and something sets it off and the whole thing just turns into a big black hole. That’s not supposed to happen.

That as you heat up, as the black hole gets hotter and hotter, as the accretion just builds up around it, then the radiation starts to pour out of it and infalling material is prevented from happening. This is the Eddington Limit. And yet black holes have been seen beating the Eddington Limit.

And so maybe it is possible. And we have seen examples where perhaps black holes have formed directly. This idea of direct collapse.

You don’t need to go through star just, you know, accretion material until it’s fat. This other idea, as you say, primordial black holes, these might’ve formed in just ripples of space-time moments after the Big Bang. And then they got a headstart.

Yeah. You can have a black hole with, uh, 5 million times the mass of the sun early on in the universe. If it started at 4 million times the mass of the sun, right at the Big Bang and just kept on feeding from there and could be an explanation for dark matter.

So, you know, everything comes together nicely, except that we, we don’t see evidence really of, of either of these things, of direct collapse black holes or of, of primordial black holes.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So, so I’m not ready to say that these aren’t direct collapse black hole systems. Um, I’m just not ready to say we’ve disproven that there’s enough papers that are able to fit the pieces together. They’re able to model what the spectrum would look like and it matches.

And because the densities in the early universe were so different, it seems that for this moment in time, it may have been possible. And this idea that you have collapse coming in from multiple directions with a disc that is the bulk of the source of light, but it’s heating everything around it. It seems to fit the lack of variability in light that we’re seeing.

That’s another one of the differences is AGN flicker. It’s kind of awesome. It allows us to map out the sizes of accretion discs through echo mapping.

Um, the, the size of the disc and the size of the variations in time have to match. And, and so we don’t see any of that variability, but if you have a cloud of material all the way around that desk, you’re not going to be able to see into the core of the desk and see that variability. So there’s that enshrouding nature that’s getting answered.

The spectrum seems to match. And if this is the only case where these things would be observed, they’re rare enough that it could explain massive galaxies early on and everything else forms through hierarchical clustering, but it’s too early in the story. We’re going to have to come back to this in five years, but you need to know these exist.

Fraser Cain: 

Right, right. And there’s a couple of issues. One is where is what comes next?

So, you know, because James Webb and the other telescopes are time machines, they let us see little snapshots of the universe at different times. And so we’re seeing all of these little red dots at different ages, but within the first billion years of the universe, but you would expect to see objects that are now the next phase of whatever those started out as. And this has not been very well documented.

There’s a couple of papers where people are starting to propose that some objects that are actually giving off a lot of bluer light are a transition that maybe you’re getting this switch on of the visible light, the ultraviolet light, and you’re getting sort of turning into whatever comes next. You know, we’re seeing their baby Pokemon version with James Webb, and then hopefully we’re trying to find the larger versions. We’re looking for the Eevees.

Yeah. So that’s one sort of angle that we can watch is to look for the kinds of things that they turn into and that it gives you more information about what’s still there. Another paper that I was looking at that I found really interesting is that people simulated how big stars, how big that first generation of stars should be.

And the expectation is that they should be gigantic, but they simulated, in fact, they should be tearing off into small stars, just like normal-ish sized stars, and then exploding as well. And so maybe you just got a whole bunch of black holes clustered together that are in the process of coming together to maybe just like a ton of stars. And maybe, like, here’s my hope, is that these are globular clusters.

That maybe whatever it is, like right around the very beginning, they formed giant collections of stars, and we see them to this day. That would be really exciting to me. So yeah, it’s a wonderful mystery.

And hopefully, almost certainly, we will come back in a couple of years and go, okay, here’s what they are. And right now, it’s all in play.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And the wild thing is there’s so many different options. Like me, I’m kind of expecting the little red dots shut off as extremely dusty, extremely enshrouded disks or clouds of stars begin to light up, and they just haven’t produced the ultraviolet light yet necessary to clear out and make things visible. But we don’t know.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, we don’t know.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

That’s the amazing part.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. And so you ask anybody, what I think is, you know, astronomers are going to have what they think is their most likely outcome. But if you showed them a piece of evidence that just proved that, they’d be like, yep, okay, that’s out.

They’re going to hold their ideas very loosely right now, because there’s still so much science to be done, and it’s an exciting mystery. So I look forward to that episode where we’re like, okay, here’s the boring explanation for what it is.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Just please call them quasi stars and not black hole stars. That’s the only thing I ask.

Fraser Cain: 

Good luck with that. I know. Thanks, Pebble.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all of our patrons. You truly make this show possible.

This show wouldn’t exist without the amazing support of so many over on patreon.com slash astronomycast. This week, we would like to thank in particular Andrew Stevenson, Antisor, Arno DeGroot, Astro Bob, Bob Kale, Boogie Nat, Smansky, Daniel Schechter, David, David Rosetta, Dr. Whoa, Don Mundus, Dr. Jeff Collins, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frodo Tanenbaugh, Jeff McDonald, James Roger, Jim Schooler, J-O, Jonathan Poe, Kenneth Ryan, Kimberly Rake, Labrat Matt, Larry Dotz, Marco Yarasi, Mark Schneider, MHW1961 Super Symmetrical, Michael Hartford, Michael Prashada, Michael Regan, Nyla, Papa Hot Dog, Paul D. Disney, Paul Jarman, Philip Walker, Randall, RJ Basque, Robert Hundle, Robert Pelasma, Ron Thorson, Sam Brooks and his mom, Shersom, Semjan Torfason, Zeggy Kemmler, Steven Rutley, Thomas Gazzetta, Tiffany Rogers, Van Ruckman, Wanderer M101, Will Hamilton.

Thank you all so very much. That pause is where Rich is now going to drop in the previously recorded names.

Fraser Cain: 

I like this where we don’t do this live. This is great.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh, I know.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. All right. Thank you, Pamela. Thanks, everybody. And we will see you all next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Goodbye, everyone.

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