The Universe Is Full of Tiny Red Dots—and They’re One of Astronomy’s Biggest Discoveries in Decades

A team from the University of Texas at Austin and its partners is a winner of the 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair for shedding new light on mysterious red dots, a newly discovered class of astronomical objects.

When the Webb space telescope first opened its eyes onto the early universe, it revealed something strange: luminous, red-tinted dots billions of light years away from Earth. And they were everywhere, appearing in almost every deep-field image. There was one problem, though: scientists had…