Little red dots

Shortly after the James Webb Space Telescope began surveying the universe in 2022, astronomers started noticing things they called little red dots. They are the furthest visible galaxies, and appear tiny and red because that is how galaxies look when they are very far away. There are loads of them and some have now been examined in detail. Interesting features are emerging. Analysis of the elements present indicate that these are not the first generation or two of stars, but quite a few generations on, further challenging the standard model of cosmology’s mechanism of galaxy formation. The little red dots each appear to contain a supermassive black hole, which further suggests that these behemoths formed first, before their surrounding galaxies, by direct collapse rather than via massive stars. Most interestingly (because this is a totally new feature) the little red dots have turned out to be very small and very tightly packed collections of stars. Says Josephine Baggen of Yale University: “They’re about 100 times smaller than a typical galaxy we see today, like the Milky Way, but it’s possible that they have the same stellar mass. That’s a big issue.” There is no good explanation for why a galaxy should look like this in the early universe and then relax out into what we see in the late universe.

Mind Beyond Matter of course (haha) has an answer. Where the standard model of cosmology recognises only one force contracting spacetime – gravity – I have proposed there are two.

The contracting pools of dark energy would team up with gravity, creating the necessary conditions. If the contracting dark energy is diminishing by a constant factor then it will be doing so on an exponential curve of decreasing slope. In other words, the earlier in the universe, the bigger the contracting dark energy well to assist gravity. And the later in the universe the smaller the dark energy well to assist gravity.

So we can see why a) galaxies in the early universe would be small and tightly packed, as they develop within the combined well and b) why we get a different picture in the late universe, as the contracting dark energy is no longer an important factor.