There is a problem in the early Universe, one that demands an answer.

Or maybe there isn’t. But at least, there is something weird going on in the data, and as a theorist, that’s good enough for me.

JWST, our newest space telescope, is capable of peering back further into the history of the Universe than previously possible. Sensitive to the infrared (IR) wavelengths, it can see the earliest stars whose visible light has been redshifted into the IR by the expansion of the Universe. Among its many surprising discoveries, it has identified a population of “little red dots” — early galaxies with a perhaps surprising number of stars given how early they are forming and with evidence of supermassive black holes with high masses already formed in their galactic cores.