The James Webb Space Telescope hangs suspended in darkness, its orbit balanced precisely with the gravitational pull of Earth and Sun. Its hexagonal, golden mirrors stare out into deep space – and back into deep time.

The Webb was meant to give us our clearest look at the earliest moments of the universe. But when it was first switched on, astronomers were confronted with an unexpected vista: a sparkle of dense red dots, stretched across the universe.

Some called them “rubies” or, less poetically, “little red dots”. Others preferred “universe breakers”, as they did not fit our established models of the universe. “There were a lot of questions,” says Swinburne University astronomer Dr Rebecca Davies. Like: “Is our knowledge of cosmology broken?”

Three years after their discovery, a conse

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