Time for some lighter / “Gee Whiz!” interstellar / space / early Universe science fare, on a Friday afternoon.

Here may be the evidence, that connects “first gen bodies” in the early Universe, to the family tree that becomes what we now call super-massive black holes — in our present day observations. But even that is a euphemism, as many of them are just being observed now — after their waves have traveled for some 5 billion years, to reach JWST and Hubble and Chandra. But they are the likely great grand-kids of these primordial “red dots”, it seems:

…A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years.

A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could explain what the hundreds or potentially thousands of these objects are. A paper describing the results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Shortly after NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope started its science observations, reports of a new class of mysterious objects emerged. Astronomers found small, red objects about 12 billion light-years from Earth or farther, which became known as “little red dots” (LRDs).

Many scientists think LRDs are supermassive black holes embedded in clouds of dense gas, which mask some of the typical signatures in different kinds of light – including X-rays – that astronomers usually use to identify them. This would make them different from typical growing supermassive black holes, which are not embedded in dense gas, allowing bright ultraviolet light and X-rays from material orbiting the black holes to escape. . . .

This new “X-ray dot” (officially known as 3DHST-AEGIS-12014), which is located about 11.8 billion light-years from Earth, may provide a crucial bridge between black hole stars and typical growing supermassive black holes. It exhibits most of the features of an LRD, including being small, red, and located at a vast distance, but it glows in X-ray light, unlike other LRDs.

“Astronomers have been trying to figure out what little red dots are for several years,” said lead author Raphael Hviding of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. “This single X-ray object may be – to use a phrase – what lets us connect all of the dots….”

Said another way, these red dots are about… twice to thrice as old as our known supermassive black holes… thus they are “the ancestors” — to ours. Grin….

नमस्ते