Even years after the discovery of the first little red dot, not much about them is settled. Dale Kocevski, an astrophysicist at Colby College, recalls leading a discussion about them at an April 2026 conference in Aspen, Colorado. He started by recapping what he hoped would be an uncontroversial idea about their trace amounts of blue light. “The group erupted into argument, and we couldn’t even get past the first bullet point,” he said.
Many astronomers still argue that little red dots are traditional black holes—even the new duo. “The data is really compelling,” said Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge. “I’m a little bit more dubious about the interpretation.”
For each point in favor of black hole stars, Maiolino fires off a quick rebuttal. The lack of flicker? In the early universe, black holes may have had a steadier food supply and may therefore have been tidier eaters. The lack of x-rays? Standard galactic black holes are ringed by a thick doughnut of gas and dust, which can block most x-rays. He sees no reason to suspect the little red dots of being anything other than standard supermassive black holes.
The redness of the new objects is striking, he said, and he agrees that it means there must be a ton of gas between the black hole and us. But that gas could come in the form of the doughnut, or as puffy clouds that fill in patches of the black hole’s sky, as opposed to the shell of gas around a black hole star. Maiolino agrees that electron scattering likely contributes to broadening the lines in the spectra of some of the little red dots. But electron scattering also smears hydrogen lines from supermassive black holes, he said.
Maiolino and his collaborator, Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz, argue that the redness of the dots comes mainly from the angle at which we see them. The reddest dots are those that we happen to see edge on, their gassy doughnuts blocking our view. Webb also sees some “little blue dots.” These could be the same exposed black holes, viewed top-down, Maiolino and Madau pointed out in spring 2026. They also appeal to Occam’s razor—in this case arguing that black holes are a simpler explanation for little dots of all colors.
Roberto Maiolino, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, argues that textbook models of standard black holes — no star required — can explain observations both old and new.Courtesy of Roberto Maiolino
At this stage either theory—black hole or black hole star—could match what the Webb telescope has seen. “I don’t think that there is a compelling reason to prefer one or the other,” said Mauro Giavalisco, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has spent much of his career interpreting the spectra of distant galaxies.
To test their interpretations, astronomers need a clearer picture of how black hole stars might form and how exactly they expect them to look.
