The Webb telescope sees tiny red dots everywhere. Astronomers can’t agree on what they are, but some believe they may be enormous stars with black holes inside.

Courtesy of Mark Belan/ Quanta Magazine

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine .

Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang , a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered into the chains of galaxies we see today. Even in the telescope’s first images , astronomers could see a whole zoo of mysterious smears of light.

One batch of objects proved especially difficult to interpret. They glowed blindingly bright, emitting red light with long wavelengths and shining as brilliantly as a whole galaxy . They were tiny, spanning just a pixel. And they were everywhere. A couple appear in almost every image Webb takes.…