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A cluster of faint, red dots lurking in the farthest reaches of the universe could change our understanding of how supermassive black holes (SMBHs) form. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) coincidentally spotted the specks, which astronomers say are actually "baby quasars," while studying an unrelated faraway quasar called J1148+5251.  Quasars are extremely bright objects powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. The target quasar emitted its light approximately 13 billion years ago — less than a billion years after the Big Bang , according to a study published Thursday (March 7) in The Astrophysical Journal .  While these mysterious spots had been previously recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope , it wasn't until scientists viewed them using the far more powerful JWST that they could finally distinguish them from normal galaxies, according to a statement . "The JWST helped us determine that faint little red dots ...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a galaxy in the early universe that's so massive, it shouldn't exist, posing a "significant challenge" to the standard model of cosmology, according to the study authors. The galaxy, called ZF-UDS-7329, contains more stars than the Milky Way , despite having formed only 800 million years into the universe's 13.8 billion-year life span. This means they were somehow born without dark matter seeding their formation, contrary to what the standard model of galaxy formation suggests. How this could have happened is unclear, but much like previous JWST discoveries of other inexplicably massive galaxies in the early universe , it threatens to upend our understanding of how the first matter in the universe formed. The researchers published their findings Feb. 14 in the journal Nature . Related: After 2 years in space, the James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed? "Having these extremely massive ...