Every picture the James Webb Space Telescope has ever taken of deep space is photobombed by them. Tiny. Red. Everywhere. Hundreds of little crimson dots scattered across the background of nearly every deep-field image, in places where nothing was supposed to be. Astronomers stared at them for almost four years and had no answer. They appeared in the first billion years after the Big Bang, crammed into spaces smaller than our own solar system, yet burning with the light of two hundred fifty billion suns. Gas inside them moves fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in seconds. Every theory scientists tried failed. Every detector came back silent. The dots broke the rules so completely that some researchers quietly wondered if our understanding of how the universe forms was just wrong. They finally have an answer. And it changes everything.
