A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years. A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could explain what the hundreds or potentially thousands of these objects are. A paper describing the results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Shortly after NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope started its science observations, reports of a new class of mysterious objects emerged. Astronomers found small, red objects about 12 billion light-years from Earth or farther, which became known as “little red dots” (LRDs). Many scientists think LRDs are supermassive black holes embedded in clouds of dense gas, which mask some of the typical signatures in different kinds of light – including X-rays – that astronomers usually use to identify them.…