Chandra Release - April 28, 2026

Visual Description: X-ray Dot

Today's release features a composite image with an X-ray insert, and an artist's illustration of a little dot located 11.8 billion light-years from Earth.

 
Shortly after NASA's James Webb Space Telescope started its observations, reports of a new class of curious objects emerged. Astronomers discovered small red specks more than about 12 billion light-years from Earth. These mysterious objects were given the accurate and descriptive name "little red dots," or LRDs.
 

One such dot sits at the heart of the primary image of this release. The composite optical and infrared image features a smattering of distant galaxies and other cosmic objects and phenomena in a variety of colors, set against the blackness of space. At the center of the square image is a small, somewhat pixelated, little red dot, outlined in a white box for clarity. 

 
This curious, but inconspicuous, little dot is enlarged in an X-ray insert at our upper right, because it does something no other LRD has been found to do; it emits X-rays! In the insert, the dot appears as a much larger white sphere in the Chandra image, ringed with a neon purple glow. This exciting discovery has earned this little dot the nickname the "X-ray dot."

 
The X-ray dot is further enlarged in an artist's illustration. Many scientists think LRDs are supermassive black holes embedded in clouds of dense gas. Here, the dot is a round, patchy cloud of brilliant red gas. At its core is a relatively tiny black sphere, the black hole, floating in a swirling pool of pale purple mist. Research suggests that the X-ray dot represents a transition phase from an LRD to a typical growing supermassive black hole. As the black hole star consumes its surrounding gas, patchy holes appear in the cloud. This allows X-rays to poke through, which are then observed by Chandra.