Little red dots may hold the secret to the universe’s first black holes

A speck of red light in a James Webb Space Telescope image contains an unlikely giant. The object, known as QSO1, held a black hole about 50 million times the mass of the Sun when the universe was only about 700 million years old. Its surroundings contain unusually few heavy elements. Together, those clues raise a question about what was there before the black hole grew.Researchers at Johns Hopkins University tested whether QSO1 could have begun as a primordial black hole, a hypothetical object formed before the first stars. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, compares three ways such an object might have reached the mass astronomers infer today.The most plausible of those routes begins with a smaller seed that draws in gas. It offers a way to explain how a black hole could grow quickly while forming few stars nearby.