SPEAKER_08

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey Shore Rivers, Regina Barber here.

And Rachel Carlson.

With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered.

And today we have the always fun Ari Shapiro.

We're going to miss you, Ari.

Exactly.

All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Well, let's start at the beginning, Ari.

The universe probably started with the Big Bang.

Very, very beginning.

So, Ari, this story starts with images from the new James Webb Space Telescope of the very, very early universe.

We're talking like 500 million years after the Big Bang, which since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that's basically less than 5% of the universe's life.

That's Bingjie Wang, an astrophysicist who is part of a team that published a study about one of these red dots in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics last week.

So long story short, Ari, we still don't know.

They're all very different.

They all have like different features.

The lead author of that study, astrophysicist Anna de Groff, says that our existing models really just don't explain what's going on in this specific case.

Yeah.

So I reached out to astrophysicist at Yale, Priya Natarajan, and she says this could be one example of how black holes rapidly grew into supermassive black holes, but that this is only one example of a model that she and her colleague, Tal Alexander, actually proposed a while ago.