Astronomers say they’ve confirmed that three little red dots observed at the dawn of time by the James Webb Space Telescope are in fact galaxies, flouting theories about the early universe.
Not only that, but researchers say those galaxies seem to host enormous supermassive black holes — perhaps 100 to 1,000 times more massive than the one occupying the center of our own Milky Way. Normally, black holes of this maturity and scale would not be found within young galaxies.
The dots now hold the record for the earliest signatures of “old” starlight — meaning the galaxies, formed shortly after the Big Bang, brim with stars that could already be considered old, said Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State.
“These appear to be packed with ancient stars — hundreds of millions of years old — in a universe that is only 600 to 800 million years old,” said Wang, lead author on the new research about the galaxies, in a statement.
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