Little red dots: the new mystery of the Universe

In the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, objects appeared in the Universe whose existence nobody expected. The James Webb Space Telescope discovered them only recently, and today they are considered one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics.

These objects have been named “Little Red Dots”. They are unlike young galaxies or the familiar supermassive black holes. They are too bright, too compact and appeared too early to fit into existing models of the Universe’s evolution.

Recent research offers an unexpected explanation: perhaps we are looking at a completely new type of cosmic object, Black Hole Stars. If this hypothesis is confirmed, these could be the missing link between the first stars, the earliest quasars and early galaxies, and could help resolve one of the main questions of modern cosmology, the so-called “early Universe crisis”.

In the lecture we will look at:

what exactly the James Webb telescope saw

why the “Little Red Dots” have puzzled astrophysicists

what Black Hole Stars are and why this idea provokes so much discussion

how new discoveries could change our picture of the birth of the first galaxies and black holes

which questions remain unanswered and what astronomers hope to learn in the coming years

This is a lecture about how one unexpected discovery can change our understanding of the history of the Universe.

When: 20 April at 19:00

Where: Tallink Hotel

The lecture is in Russian.

About the speaker: Kirill Maslennikov is an astrophysicist, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, host of the “Astronomer’s Notes” series on the QWERTY YouTube channel, and a laureate of the Russian Academy of Sciences prize for science popularisation.

See you there!

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