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Little Red Dots, Billion-Solar-Mass Black Holes & Mars Polygons
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
James Webb's 'little red dots' are defying every explanation astronomers have, while Curiosity uncovers a mysterious honeycomb landscape on Mars. Plus: a $500M commercial space funding round and new lunar infrastructure contracts.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Hundreds of tiny, ancient objects spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope are forcing astronomers to rethink what the early universe looked like, and right now, nobody has a clean explanation for what they are. These are the so-called "little red dots." First catalogued after Webb's launch in twenty twenty-two, they appear roughly six hundred and fifty million years after the Big Bang.
Here's what sharpens the stakes. Webb has found black holes in this same early epoch that already weigh in at around a billion solar masses.
The little red dots aren't the only early-universe surprise Webb keeps delivering. The telescope's MIRI instrument has revealed unexpected diversity in galaxies from the cosmic dawn.
Shifting to Mars, and a discovery that's harder to explain the more you look at it. The Curiosity rover has documented a large-scale honeycomb landscape in a region called Valle Grande.
On the infrastructure side, two developments worth tracking. An Ecuadorian research team from USFQ has been selected for ESA's HyperGES program.
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