Alex McColgan

Firstly, as we discussed, the broadening we see in the emission lines could be exaggerated due to photon scattering, making the black hole seem more massive than it is by a factor of about 100 to 300.

And secondly, supermassive black holes might not be restricted by the speed limit we once thought.

See, black holes have a natural ceiling on how fast they can feed, called the Eddington limit.

It's set by the pressure of their own radiation pushing back against infalling gas, but dense enough surroundings can push that limit higher than initial predictions suggest.

The fact that black hole stars are surrounded by dense hydrogen atmospheres makes them exactly the kind of environment that could allow black holes to bypass their Eddington limit entirely, since the limit shifts from being calculated from the black hole mass alone

to being calculated on the entire envelope's mass, which is much larger.

The findings surrounding black hole stars indicate supermassive black holes might be smaller than expected and able to grow faster than we thought, a possibility that excites scientists working with their growth models, since it seems to ease the unresolved tension slightly.

And an even bigger question is,

Where did these black holes come from so early in the universe?

So far, the only pathway we've directly observed is through stellar collapse, which takes billions of years.

But these little red dots already existed 600 million years in, and are far too massive to have grown from stellar mass seeds in that amount of time.

So what happened?

Well, in theory, massive clouds of primordial gas in the early universe under the right conditions could collapse directly into a black hole without ever forming a star at all.

These direct collapse black holes are a well established theoretical concept, but we've never actually seen observational evidence of it.

Could the Little Red Dots be the first sightings of such a phenomenon?

Only time will tell.

For now, the focus of Little Red Dot research is on building out the basics, measuring the temperatures, luminosities and surface characteristics of Little Red Dots with enough precision to construct something like the life cycle chart

we have for ordinary stars.

We've never had one for black holes, and little red dots might finally make it possible.

Ultimately, science is the pursuit of truth.