Alex McColgan

raising the intriguing possibility that some black holes might pass through quasi-star-like phases more than once across their lifetimes.

This could explain why the little red dots vanish from sight 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

Perhaps the perfect conditions for high gas inflow are just not satisfied this late in the universe's lifetime.

Could we be confirming observationally what Begelman has already known for close to two decades?

It probably goes without saying, but despite the black hole star breakthrough, there is still a lot of uncertainty in this field.

Papers are being published faster than researchers can read them, with hundreds coming out in just the last two years alone.

For right now, the black hole star interpretation seems like the best fit to the data we currently have, but it hasn't been confirmed yet.

There are still plenty of open questions that the theory doesn't cleanly answer.

For instance, how common is the black hole star phase?

How long does it typically last?

What triggers it?

We don't know exactly how the envelope forms or what determines when it disperses.

The life cycle of a black hole star, if that's what these objects are, is still unmapped territory.

But what makes little red dots genuinely significant, beyond the immediate mystery, is what they might represent in the larger story of how the universe came to look the way it does.

One of the deepest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics is the origin of supermassive black holes.

We know they exist at the centre of almost every large galaxy, including our own.

We know some of them were already billions of solar masses just a few hundred

100 million years after the Big Bang, which is just too fast to seem possible.

The conventional pathway to black hole formation predicts objects should be about 10 to 100 solar masses by that point in time.

The black hole star model offers a potential way out of this paradox, and it works on two fronts.