Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics, a Harvard-Smithsonian collaboration, published the Lumina Project in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, modeling the first 2 billion years of cosmic history across a cube about 1.5 billion light-years wide. The simulation was run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer using roughly 15,000 of its 37,000 GPUs, surpassing the 2022 Thesan simulation in both scale and timespan covered.
cnet.com
· 2026-10-26
Two astronomy teams using the James Webb Space Telescope reported in spring 2025 that they observed a pair of 'little red dots' unlike any previously seen objects, including other little red dots found since 2023. Researchers led by Anna de Graaff at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy propose these are a new kind of object: a vast, puffed-up cloud of hydrogen gas that shines as brightly as billions of suns while concealing a supermassive black hole at its center, which they call a 'black hole star.'
wired.com
· 2026-10-24
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified a widespread class of compact, reddish objects dating to the universe's first billion years, dubbed 'little red dots.' Researchers say these objects have puzzled the field since their discovery, and new analysis is now offering possible explanations for what they are.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-25
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope had largely concluded that mysterious compact objects called 'little red dots' were supermassive black holes obscured by dust. But two newly analyzed dots studied by teams led by de Graaff and Naidu show a distinctive Balmer break—a spectral signature usually associated with hot stellar surfaces—that standard black hole models don't produce, complicating the picture.
quantamagazine.org
· 2026-09-18
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