What are JWST's little red dots?

25:05All right, everyone, we're going to take a break and I'm going to have a little chat with Daniel about why all of these references to looking into people's windows are really creepy. And I'm going to try to make sure that Daniel doesn't dwell too hard, thinking about all the messages he might have missed while the James Webb Space Telescope was getting calibrated early on. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what we expected to see when the James Webb Space Telescope got turned on.

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26:24It's these details that make creating with Wix Harmony feel seamless. Join millions of businesses already using Wix and try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com slash harmony. That's wix.com slash harmony.

26:41Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glabal from Smart Talks with IBM. Today we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi, the Ferrari superfans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something. So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history.

27:26And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.

28:16or injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EbGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EbGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EbGliss.

28:43Before starting EbGliss, tell your Ask your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Every business has an ambition. PayPal Open is the platform designed to help you grow into yours with access to business loans so you can expand and hundreds of millions of PayPal customers worldwide. Your customers can pay all the ways they want today with PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, and all major cards so you can focus on the future. When you need a partner trusted by millions, there's one platform for all business.

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29:51This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

30:04Welcome back to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. I promise Daniel's going to be less creepy in this next segment, or at least I've done what I can to try to make that happen. Kelly, what if the aliens are expecting us to communicate with them via our bathroom windows? What if they've trained their telescope on our bathroom windows and they're like, I don't see anything. These guys are just not interested in conversation. Then we just got to let them go, Daniel. We got to take that chance. Let them go. No, unacceptable. Unacceptable. Daniel, you live in this world. Play by this world's rules.

30:37Oh, my goodness. That's not the recipe for meeting aliens, Kelly. You've got to think outside the box and outside the window. It's the recipe for staying out of jail, Daniel. It's a good recipe. It's a good recipe. You know, if I'm willing to vaporize the planet to meet aliens, I'm willing to risk prison. I think maybe we should just put you in prison, actually. We'd all be safer if you were there. But then we wouldn't get to enjoy your wonderful explanation. I wonder if you could do a podcast from prison. Probably. Anyway, let's hope that never happens. I'm torn. But all right. So what did we expect to see from the James Webb Space Telescope?

31:17So we were hoping to learn more about the early universe. Remember, James Webb is good at seeing the infrared. Stuff that's really far away is redshifted. We're seeing that faraway stuff now because light has taken a long time to get to us from it, which means we're seeing really out-of-date information, but we're seeing from the early universe. So our goal was to see more about the early universe. And we have ideas about the early universe, but they were a little bit fuzzy. Basic picture of the early universe that we have is we start with some very hot, very dense, unexplained state. Remember, the Big Bang does not include a singularity.

31:52It starts from a hot, dense state filling the whole universe, but it has tiny fluctuations in it. It's not perfectly smooth. So where you have a fluctuation that gives you higher density, you can have a little bit more gravity, and that tends to pull stuff towards it, and you get higher density and higher density. So there's a runaway effect. If the universe started out perfectly smooth, you would get no structure. But if there's little fluctuations and a lot of time, gravity will work to build those structures. So you start from a primordial plasma, very hot and dense. Those fluctuations probably come from quantum mechanics.

32:25Gravity gradually builds up structure. And most of the universe is dark matter, right? Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, not visible matter, not hydrogen, not helium, but dark matter. And so it's really the dynamics of that dark matter that shape the structure of the universe. People often write to me about dark matter and they say, oh, it's just to fill in the gap of galaxy rotation curves, but it's so much more. We need dark matter at every stage of the universe. Without dark matter in your model, you cannot explain how structure formed in the universe. There isn't enough time in the universe to pull together gas to make stars and galaxies in 14 billion years without the gravity of dark matter.

33:07So you need dark matter everywhere in the universe. It's definitely a thing, folks. It's not just a fudge factor. I'm over-responding to a particular email I got this morning from a listener. That sounds surprisingly specific, but this is not the kind of thing that emits in the infrared, right? So James Webb Space Telescope would not be seeing dark matter, right? That's right. Dark matter, we think, doesn't emit at all. But it shapes the structure that we do see, right? And so what you end up with is over densities of dark matter, these gravitational wells that pull in gas. So you have huge clouds of gas where you have dark matter.

33:42So the gas tells you where the dark matter is, right? It's like a tracer. And then that gas collapses also for the same reason that you have little pockets of over density. And so you get collapsed into stars and the first set of stars then come together to form galaxies. The gas tells you where the dark matter is. I think I heard the rest of what you said, but maybe I didn't make it past that part. And whose mind is stuck in the bathroom now, Kelly? As long as no one's looking, I can keep it to myself and that's fine. And so, you know, that's the rough picture of the or very early universe. And from there you get stars and galaxies, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

34:23But there's a lot of details that we didn't understand. For example, we didn't know for a long time, do you form big galaxies like the Milky Way, which is huge, hundreds of billions of stars? Do you form that all at once? Like a bunch of stars come together to make a big galaxy? Is there like a monolithic collapse where you have a huge cloud of gas and they all form stars and boom, you have a galaxy? Or do small galaxies form and then merge? And so for a long time, people thought that galaxies formed big, big monolithic collapse happened, that you have waves of star formation. But the new idea from observations of the early universe and from more distant galaxies is that there's a merger cycle, that you start with these early stars, these Population 3 stars, terribly named Population 3.

35:12Oh, you guys. I know. The first stars were really, really big, like 100 to 300 times the mass of the sun, and so big that they burned really hot and were really short-lived. And then they die and seed another generation of stars, and those come together to form small mini-galaxies. And then galaxies merge to make big galaxies. So it's like a hierarchical formation of the galaxies. This is sort of what we expected. And so when we turned James Webb on, we were expecting to see a bunch of little galaxies before they emerged. You know, some irregular and some this and some that. But we're expecting to see early galaxy formation.

35:50Okay. And given how good you guys are at naming things, the galaxies were going to be like M1429, right? As opposed to like, you know, Lisa Simpson or something amusing. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's a hard problem because there are lots of galaxies. Like you cannot fathom how many galaxies we're talking about. If you hold up your finger at arm's length and point it up at the sky, then like the part of the sky blocked by your fingernail on your pinky contains about a million galaxies. Whoa. Yeah, that's intense. Your pinky fingernail, okay? There's a million in there. So there's so many galaxies.

36:28And the deeper you look into the sky, the more you see. And the reason we talk about galaxies is because that's what the universe is made out of. That's basically the building block of the universe is galaxies. And also, we can't see individual stars mostly. Like these galaxies are so far away that you can just resolve them. And you can see the galaxy maybe a little bit about the shape, but you can't like zoom in on an individual star. Remember, there's still this diffraction limit. There's a pixelization even before we digitize our data, right? because of the diffraction limit of optics, because we're talking about waves and there's interference when things come through an aperture.

37:06So there's a fundamental pixelization of the data we can see. So we can't resolve finer details, which is why we study galaxies. And this was all true before the James Webb Space Telescope, or we're talking about the case now that we have the James Webb Space Telescope, we're still just looking at galaxies? We're still just looking at galaxies, and we were before James Webb. Like Hubble's deep field, for example, is just like stare out into space and gather light for a little while and see what comes out into the dark bits? And the answer is galaxies. So many galaxies. Oh my gosh, galaxies. It's just galaxies everywhere.

37:41Which is amazing. And that's what we understood before James Webb turned on. And so we expected to get more clarity on this picture. How are these galaxies forming? What do they look like? We also were wondering about the supermassive black holes. Remember that we see black holes in the early universe, and we can see them because they're really, really bright. We call them quasars. They emit really powerful streams of light out of the center of the galaxies. And these quasars are really bright, which suggests the black holes are really big. And this model we've talked about, about gradually merging galaxies, and then their black holes also merge, can't account for the black holes that we already saw before James Webb.

38:19We saw these quasars, which means black holes that are really big, very early in the universe, this model of slowly building galaxies cannot get you big enough black holes fast enough to explain the supermassive black holes we saw before James Webb. That's a longstanding mystery. What is the origin of the supermassive black holes in the universe? So we were hoping when we turned on James Webb to see some more clarity about this, their formation of the universe, how these things are coming together, what's going on. And, you know, they expected to see relatively faint, irregular proto-galaxies and a small number of black holes forming over time.

38:57And so, you know, basically refined existing models. That's the sort of naive expectation. Oh, you physicists with your cute little ideas about how the world works. But, you know, we also were hoping to be surprised. That's sort of like your best guess based on the data. But the reason we build these things is not to refine our models and like dot I's and cross T's. We build these things to blow our minds. We build these things to explore the universe, right? We build these things because we don't want to rely on our intuition. We want to be confronted by reality. We want the universe to give up the ghost and say, okay, here's what's going on.

39:35Check out this crazy thing you never even imagined. You know, nobody imagined pulsars before we discovered them. that so many times we have looked out into the universe and seen something crazy that blew our minds and forced us to reimagine how we see the universe. And, you know, that's science at work. Science is not like, let's protect the dogma so I can keep getting my grant funding. Science is like, let's discover something crazy and new so I can get more grant funding. Right. No, you looked out into the universe and you saw job security because there's something we hadn't even thought of.

40:08No, I'm just kidding. And it blew your mind. I totally agree. Exactly. Okay, so what did we see that was so surprising then? So we had this model. We thought we kind of knew what we were going to see, but we were hoping we'd also see something exciting. What was the exciting thing we saw? So we saw little red dots. And that's why we're focusing on this for today's episode, because these things were weird and unexpected. So what are little red dots? Well, they are literally, if you look at the James Webb Space Telescope images, they are little red and dotted, right? So they're bright, they're red, and there's a lot of them.

40:45So we've discovered a few hundred of them so far because we've only looked in a few places. But there's a lot of them relative to the number of galaxies we've seen. So like a few percent of the objects we've seen in the early universe are these little red dots. Huh. And are they in galaxies? Are they between galaxies? Are they randomly distributed? They are their own thing, right? And so people are wondering, are they a weird kind of galaxy? Are they an early stage of galaxies? They were really strange. And nobody expected to see these things. Maybe one or two if a galaxy got really weird, but there's just too many of these.

41:21And they formed really early in the universe. So we're talking about 600 million years after that T equals zero moment when things were really hot and really dense. And then they went away. So by a billion and a half years after the beginning of the universe, no more little red dots. So these things are strange because they're really compact. They are very bright and very red. And also they have a really strange spectrum. Remember that when we're looking at something from the early universe, we can see it. And even though we can't always resolve spatial features, like we can't see, is there a bump on it?

41:55Or like, what color is that window? We can look at the intensity at different wavelengths. So there's like this other dimension we can always do. We'd like take the light and split it in a prism and ask, oh, how much red is there? How much green is there? How much blue is there? How much of this frequency? And usually we see like a peak somewhere based on the temperature. You know, like if you're looking at the earth from space, you would see a peak at a frequency determined by surface temperature. And when you look at a star, the same thing. You can tell the temperature of distant stars by looking at their peak.

42:27Or you see strong emission lines from some particular interaction. Like black holes tend to have really hot gas that emits x-rays, or you see dust that absorbs at a certain frequency. These guys have a really weird frequency. It has a V shape in it. So it's like this broad emission at lower wavelengths, and then a huge dip in the middle, and then broad emission at higher wavelengths. So it's weird because it doesn't look like a young galaxy. It also doesn't look like a black hole. It looks sort of like something new and weird with maybe like a cloud around it that's absorbing light at some frequency.

43:06So maybe something like shrouded in dust that we don't understand. What is it? Like, this is killing me. So wait, okay. So, I mean, could it just be like all this stuff sort of collecting and it's dusty and it's just very early? What's going on? So we have a few theories. And we're going to go to a break. And when we come back, Daniel will tell us about them.

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44:22It's these details that make creating with Wix Harmony feel seamless. Join millions of businesses already using Wix and try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com slash harmony. That's wix.com slash harmony.

44:39Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glabal from Smart Talks with IBM. Today, we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi, the Ferrari superfans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something. So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history.

45:24And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.

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46:22Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

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48:02All right, that break was particularly painful. Daniel, what do we think these little red dots are that appear to maybe be dusty clouds that emit at weird spectrum? Yeah, tell us, what do we think they could be? So there's no theory that perfectly describes what we're seeing, but there's a bunch of proto-theories. And I love that because what you're seeing, again, is science in action. You know, science is not done by developing perfect theories or waiting to publish until your theory is perfectly formed and describes the data. It's always work in progress. It's like, here's an idea. Here's how well it works.

48:37Here's the pros and the cons, right? And then there's an ongoing discussion or argument about as these theories develop, which one works best, and eventually one of them wins out. And this is how science happens, right? No, seriously, friends. It's awesome that after an hour, you don't get an answer. But no, really, this is how science works. Yeah. And so nobody knows the answer. One theory is that these are young galaxies, right? And they're so unexpectedly bright because they're undergoing intense bursts of star formation. So these are called starburst galaxies. Because remember, we talked about this giant cloud of gas and it's collapsing to form stars.

49:14If that happens all at the same time for like these mini galaxies, instead of having a mega collapse to the Milky Way, we start with mini galaxies. But if that's somehow coordinated across the galaxy, you have a bunch of stars all born at the same time, then you're going to get really bright emissions. That's the idea. And this is a nice idea because it doesn't require you to invent some new thing in the universe. It's just like a new arrangement of stuff we already knew. And it tries to explain this V shape in the spectrum, this dip in the middle of the spectrum, by saying, well, it's not actually a dip.

49:46There's nothing that's being absorbed there. It's just that the edges are really bright. So the center looks like a dip. So instead of like subtracting away the center of the spectrum, they're enhancing the sides of the spectrum. By saying that comes from starburst formation. Okay, so it's not that it's dusty. Yeah. It's just the message is getting thrown off because it's so bright. Yeah, exactly. So it looks like the center is suppressed, but it's really that the edges are enhanced. And that's why the center looks dimmer than the edges of the spectrum. Okay. So that's one idea. It's not a great theory because we don't understand how you form these galaxies so quickly.

50:26They're really bright. The models of galaxy formation do not predict this, so that you get these galaxies that are so bright and so intense and having these starbursts all at the same time. And the emission spectrums predicted by these theories don't describe this very easily. You don't get this kind of spectrum. So it's not a great fit. It's like, let's take the current idea of what we expected to see and try to tweak the knobs on it as much as we can to get it to describe it. And it's like, you can kind of get there a little bit, but it's really just not a good fit. And that's what's exciting, right?

50:59It's exciting because it suggests that, like, well, we need new ideas. But do we see other young galaxies anywhere? Are we proposing that these red dots are a kind of young galaxy? Or is this like, we looked for young galaxies, we don't see them anywhere, and we're like, well, maybe this is what it is because we can't find them. Yeah, so that's the funny thing is that we do see some of those proto-galaxies, the ones that we expected. The regular clumpy shapes, they're like actively forming stars. They're not super compact. They're normally bright. And we also, in addition, see these little red dots.

51:34They're very compact, very red, very bright with a weird spectrum. So we don't just see what we expected. We also see these weird guys that we can't quite fit into the model. Huh, okay. All right, so then what else could they be? Well, there's a lot of excitement about black holes, right? Maybe these things are black holes forming early in the universe and then with a lot of dust around them. So like dust obscured black holes may be at the centers of very, very young galaxies. Remember that there's a mystery about where do the supermassive black holes in the universe come from? How did they get so big so fast?

52:11So maybe we're seeing those black holes being born. And for some reason, there's dust around them that's making the dip in this spectrum, that's absorbing that light to suppress the center of the spectrum. That's one idea. How good is that idea? And every time you say supermassive black hole, does it also make you want to go to a muse concert?

52:37it really does have a rhythm to it doesn't it super massive black hole it's good because it explains why these things are small right black holes are very very dense and why these things are bright black holes have really intense radiation because they heat up the stuff nearby remember the black hole is not directly glowing the accretion disc around them has a lot of friction and a lot of gravity, and that's the thing that gets really hot and glows. And so it explains that. It also can explain the dip in the spectrum because you have a lot of dust there that's obscuring that part of the spectrum.

53:12But there's some problems with this theory. Like number one, black holes tend to be really, really hot and they tend to glow in the X-ray. Right? Like we see black holes out there. We've discovered some just by their X-ray emissions. They're very bright in the X-ray because of this hot gas. we do not see a lot of x-rays from these little red dots. And so that doesn't really fit with the black hole scenario. But there's a counter to that concern, which is James Webb can see in the infrared. It's not great at seeing the x-rays. And a lot of these places where we have imaged with the James Webb and we've seen these little red dots, we have not yet had a chance to point x-ray telescopes at these things, right?

53:50So what you want is to see the sky in multiple frequencies. You want all of your telescope pointed at the same thing. So you see the infrared, you see the optical, you see the X-ray. That's really expensive. Even just getting time on the James Webb is a big deal. Getting also the Hubble or also Chandra or one of our X-ray telescopes to look at this thing, very challenging. So definitely one thing to do is follow up on these little red dots using X-ray telescopes. But are the LRDs everywhere? The LRDs are everywhere. Yeah, they're distributed just like the galaxies are. Okay. But you just want to make sure that you're looking at the exact same spot that the James Webb was so that you can say, okay, we know that James Webb saw one here.

54:28Okay, got it. Exactly. Yeah. Another issue is that these things are weirdly uniform. Like they all look about the same. They're all the same brightness, et cetera. Whereas galaxies with supermassive black holes in them with active galactic nuclei, like emitting bright radiation, tend to be really variable. Like the fraction of the galaxy's mass that's contained in the black hole is usually really, really small, but there's a lot of variation there. And we don't see that kind of variability among these little red dots, which is like, that's kind of weird. It's not a great fit for the black hole hypothesis.

55:03Also, these guys would be really, really massive. Like we're talking about masses between 10 million and a billion of our sun's masses. Wow. Very early in the universe. And it'd be really cool to see that. But again, we can't explain why that would happen. There's no way to explain how you get a billion solar mass black hole this quickly in the universe. It's like trying to grow a skyscraper from a seed in a couple of days. There's just no explanation for it, which doesn't mean it can't exist. And that's exactly the kind of discovery everybody would love to make, right? But it makes you skeptical because it would be a really big discovery.

55:42The other issue is that this requires a lot of dust. If you are going to quiet a very bright object in one part of the spectrum, you need a lot of dust to emit that. Remember, dust absorbs in certain frequencies because of its size, right? Really long wavelength stuff is going to go through the dust, shorter wavelength. Things are like about the wavelength of the dust will interact with the dust and get absorbed. But if you do that, the dust absorbs that energy, then it heats up and you expect that dust to then glow in the infrared. So the hypothesis that it's a black hole, which is emitting a lot of radiation, and it's being shrouded by dust, well, that dust should be heated up, and you should be able to see that dust glowing in the infrared, and we don't.

56:27So this is the kind of game you play. You come up with a hypothesis, and then you make a prediction. If this was true, we should see the dust glowing. Oops, we don't. Uh-oh. So that's not a checkmark for that theory. Okay. So is now when we talk about this possibly being a message from aliens?

56:47You know, I'd love for it to be a message from aliens, but they're everywhere, right? It's not like here's one system where something is going on. It's something very early in the universe where it's hard to imagine, you know, intelligent technological life already forming just a few million years after the Big Bang. Earth came fairly late in the universe. We didn't form until 5 billion years ago or so in a 14 billion year old universe. So you could imagine arguing that you could have intelligent life earlier in the universe, but 500 million years after the Big Bang, that's pretty tough. It could be though, right?

57:23I would love to be surprised, but then it would also be ubiquitous, right? It's in every direction. That'd be pretty weird. But there are fun ideas about weird stuff that could have caused this. Some people are arguing for direct collapse black holes. Instead of black holes where first you have a star and then it burns out and then it collapses and to form a black hole when it runs out of its fusion fuel, just go straight to a black hole. Enough gravity to overcome any fusion pressure or any degeneracy pressure straight to a black hole. Nobody's ever seen this. It's very speculative, very theoretical.

58:02It would explain supermassive black holes, right? Because that's a theory for how you get so big so fast is that you use an accumulation method that we haven't considered, right? Going straight to a black hole and not wasting time glowing for a few hundred million years. That doesn't sound like a good use of time. It would be kind of awesome, but it feels like it should be rare. The calculations suggest that it shouldn't happen very often, and so it's hard to use this to explain so many little red dots. But again, we're looking for surprises. We're looking to learn. So you can't throw out an idea because it conflicts with your previous theories.

58:40You're hoping to conflict with your previous theories. But you have to find a way to make it work. You also can't just say, oh, this doesn't agree with my theories, therefore it's true. You have to find a new explanation. you have to find a coherent, holistic theory that explains what we're seeing. So direct collapse black holes could explain supermassive black holes in the early universe if we find a way to make them more common. Another idea is that maybe we're seeing exotic or supermassive stars. Remember, we talked about the first stars in the universe being population three stars, these really massive, very short-lived stars.

59:18Nobody's ever seen these because they lived very, very briefly, just a few million years or tens of millions of years. And we can't resolve individual stars in early galaxies. So nobody's ever seen directly population three stars. They're only theoretical. And so it could be that these are population three stars, very early star formation, but much more massive than we expected, maybe like up to a million solar masses. Wow. There's like a limit on the size of a star, sort of surprisingly, above 250 or 300 solar masses. The interior gets so hot and the fusion happens so fast that the star basically blows itself apart.

59:58And those are the limits theoretically. And we've never seen a star bigger than that. But, you know, early in the universe, stars made mostly of hydrogen, maybe up to a million solar masses. The models people have developed for this kind of match the spectrum that you've seen. Epic. You know, it's like the photosphere of this star is predicted to give sort of a V shape in the spectrum, which would be really awesome. And it could help explain supermassive black holes. But, you know, this is very, very speculative stuff. And the models are still very approximate. As you develop an idea, you first describe it simply and then you improve it iteratively.

1:00:35You know, as time goes on, you have more energy, more resources. And so the models are still very early in development. And it could be that as we make them more realistic, they drift away from describing the data rather than towards it. We don't know. But, you know, there are people out there working on this stuff, and maybe they're right. Awesome. And so, so far, we've only talked about stuff that we've already thought about, but just we're thinking about it a little bit differently. Do you think it's possible the answer could be something completely out of the box? Absolutely. We are doing our best to describe something new, but it's been years already.

1:01:11These LRTs were seen very early in the James Webb run, and we have not explained them yet. And so the first thing you've got to do to be conscientious is try to find a more prosaic explanation. But at some point, you've got to be more creative and come up with new things that might be able to describe what we're seeing. And the best way to do that is to get more information. Look at these things in the radio using Alma. Look at these things in x-ray scans. Try to figure out what this means. You know, this also could be a harbinger of things to come. Like the James Webb Space Telescope is great, but it can basically only see bright things in the early universe.

1:01:47It could be that this is just like the tip of the iceberg and the early universe is filled with all sorts of stuff we never imagined. We're only seeing the brightest ones because that's what we're capable of. But maybe future telescopes will be able to resolve dimmer things that are even weirder. Wow. So, yeah, there's a lot of potentially exciting stuff. The fact that this mystery has survived this long suggests we have a lot to learn about the early universe either way. Give more money to telescope people. More eyes on the sky. Absolutely. You had to make it sound kind of creepy, didn't you?

1:02:25No, that's not creepy. That's just being open-minded. That's just accepting the information the universe is sending us, man. Save it for the judge.

1:02:37All right. I'm happy to be prosecuted in the universal court of knowledge gathering, you know, as long as I have my alien lawyer with me to explain to narrow-minded humans who can't think beyond their parochial Virginia ethics. Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, I will be waving at you from the freedom outside your cell. And maybe we'll still be able to record twice a week. But this was awesome. I hope we figure it out. If you had to put your money on one of the things that we've talked about today, which one do you think it is? Something black hole-y for sure. Because there's already a lot of black hole mysteries in the early universe.

1:03:14Okay. And, you know, maybe this is just connecting the dots between two things that are weird. But I feel like we never really understood early universe black holes. Now we're seeing something new in the universe we don't really understand. Maybe they're connected. Oh, little red dots. How long before you tell the truth? I had to get some muse in there. No, I'm so sorry. Let's get that out. No, that was great. Matt, add some musical accompaniment to the Alberta. Oh, no. All right. Thanks, everybody. Until next time. Keep your eyes on the sky.

1:03:53Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:04:33And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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