Fabulous paper led by @wendysun.bsky.social! Here's my favorite figure -- a highly unusual HR diagram! Shows yet again why @nasawebb.extwitter.link's mysterious Little Red Dots are so special -- remarkably "cool" and yet shining with the might of 10 billion Suns!

Wendy Sun@wendysun.bsky.social · 3w ago

Little Red Dots (LRDs) have unique properties, motivating new mass estimators for their central engines. We explore ways to derive their central engine masses. Our results are consistent with LRDs hosting black hole seeds as massive as single supermassive stars (SMSs). 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2609.09274 🔭🧪

Now featured by Science Friday on NPR:

What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?

Little red dots appear all over images from the James Webb Space Telescope. They may belong to a new cosmic category called black hole stars.

sciencefriday.com

We know stars and black holes. But what about “black hole stars”? And how could such an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas help answer one of the biggest questions about the Universe? Read more: ista.ac.at/en/news/blac... #ISTAresearch #BlackHoleStar #LittleRedDots #JWST

Black Hole Star: Mirage or Miracle?

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole st...

ista.ac.at

From @qwasistellar.bsky.social & Caroline von Raesfeld: The Office of Management and Budget has proposed to completely restructure federal funding. We review the proposal and describe how to submit public comments on it by July 13th. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/07/03/omb-proposal/

Saving science as we know it: Overview of new proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget, and how we can make our voices heard.

The Office of Management and Budget has proposed to completely restructure federal funding for science as we know it. In this bite, we review the most relevant points in the proposal and describe how ...

astrobites.org

Paper Day! You may have heard about these "Little Red Dots" in JWST data. Here we use new high quality spectra to show that the their spectral appearance is primarily determined by the properties of surrounding gas. LRDs are hot engines covered by dense gas arxiv.org/abs/2603.17667

How it started (maybe let's call these things Little Red Dots???) // How it's going (xkcd #3212) 🔭🧪

Everywhere JWST looked, the telescope found at least one specimen of what are now commonly called Little Red Dots. The dots were everywhere, until they were nowhere; about 1.5 billion years after the big bang, they mostly disappear. Take a deep dive into this mystery

Weird ‘Little Red Dots’ in space are something we’ve never seen

Astronomers are racing to understand mysterious ancient objects that pepper James Webb Space Telescope images

scientificamerican.com

This week, we are hosting ISSI International Team 659, “Little Red Dots, Big Open Questions”, led by Mengyuan Xiao & Rohan Naidu @rpnaidu.bsky.social. The team brings together observers and theorists to study one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s most intriguing discoveries: Little Red Dots. 🔴🔭

This is extremely cool work about the most puzzling question in astrophysics 👀

Wendy Sun@wendysun.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Paper day!! Little Red Dots (LRDs) are seen everywhere by JWST, but even after 3 years of relentless effort we are still debating what these things actually are. We decompose LRDs to show LRD - Host Galaxy = Black Hole Star (BH*)! 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2601.20929 🔭 🧪

Paper day!! Little Red Dots (LRDs) are seen everywhere by JWST, but even after 3 years of relentless effort we are still debating what these things actually are. We decompose LRDs to show LRD - Host Galaxy = Black Hole Star (BH*)! 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2601.20929 🔭 🧪

I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing

Discovery and preliminary characterization of the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS! arxiv.org/abs/2507.02757

Spectacular images show off the Sculptor Galaxy like never before. 🤩🔭 www.iflscience.com/feast-your-e...

Feast Your Eyes On The Most Detailed 1,000-Color Image Of A Nearby Galaxy

You have never seen the Sculptor Galaxy like this before.

iflscience.com

Exactly two years ago -- the moment of submission of the "Little Red Dot" paper! @jorryt.bsky.social and I managed to find something red to wear for the occasion. Fueled by coffee/hot chocolate and photographed by Pascal Oesch!

My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...

While it is too luminous by pre-JWST standards, it aligns well with the new models of galaxy formation inspired by JWST observations

We found the most distant confirmed galaxy (some Sergej Boebka vibes 😅) arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263

A new record holder for the earliest-known / most distant galaxy, from @rpnaidu.bsky.social! It’s at redshift 14.4, or 280 million years after the Big Bang. It’s also remarkably bright & compact. The abundance of these galaxies is 100x higher than pre-JWST expectations 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263

On Friday, my son stayed home from school because he had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. He went with my husband to his office for the morning while I handled our daughter. When he came back at lunch, he was not interested in eating, saying his throat hurt too much. 1/n

Grateful that our recent paper was covered in the cosmic superstar amongst astronomy publications -- @astrobites.bsky.social! Thanks to Ansh Gupta for the thoughtful summary! astrobites.org/2025/04/22/s...

That feeling of anticipation/excitement/x-mas morning hits at 110% every single time! The most sublime instrument fashioned by humankind, for these few hours, is working hard on our behest! @jwstfeed.bsky.social @jwstobserver.bsky.social

Great article on our Pop III paper, co-led with @sfseiji.bsky.social. Thanks for capturing the excitement so well @danclery.bsky.social!

Stars made from only primordial gas finally spotted, astronomers claim

Short-cut method pinpoints a galaxy apparently formed from just hydrogen and helium

science.org

🚀 New research from #KavliAstro: Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT have proposed a way to solve two cosmic mysteries with a single underlying explanation. 🔭 #JWST #DarkEnergy #Astrophysics www.kavlifoundation.org/news/a-cosmi...

A Cosmic Twofer: “Early” Dark Energy Could Explain Anomalous Galaxies…

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research have proposed a way to solve two cosmic mysteries with a single underlying explanation

kavlifoundation.org

Paper day! With @sfseiji.bsky.social and the GLIMPSE team we report a compelling candidate for a "Pop III" galaxy. Pop III being the first generation of stars that formed out of primordial Hydrogen and Helium left over after the Big Bang. arxiv.org/abs/2501.11678

More exciting measurements on the most luminous little red dot that I know of (F444W=22 at z=4.5!): an unambiguous AGN and a Balmer break in deep UNCOVER and ALT spectroscopy, led by Ivo Labbe arxiv.org/abs/2412.04557

Yesterday was paper day! With deep JWST data from the ALT survey we provide new independent evidence that the new population of faint AGNs in the early Universe seems to have so-called overly massive black holes compared to their stellar mass arxiv.org/abs/2412.02846

Not sure if it's what I'm best known for (or most proud of), but here I showed that if the reported (high) stellar masses of some of the first galaxies revealed by JWST are correct, it would indicate a serious problem for our standard cosmological model, ΛCDM 🧪🎁: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates - Nature Astronomy

Early James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) results suggest a high level of star formation in the first 500 million years of the Universe. A study of the available mass from dark matter haloes shows that ...

nature.com

David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈@whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 2y ago

Science friends 🧪🌎🦑, @altmetric.com tracks Bluesky posts now! Quote or reply to this post with a link to the paper you’re best known for or most proud of, and a brief plain-language summary of what you found and why it matters! Let’s fill Bluesky with SCIENCE!