Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects? There are a bunch of suggestions about their origins and characteristics. For one thing, LRDs could be the light emitted from the regions around supermassive black holes hidden by dense gas clouds. It's an interesting idea, but doesn't quite square with the appearance of rapidly growing supermassive black holes of the same era because most (so far) don't appear to be hidden by gas clouds. Some have suggested that the LRDs are some form of an early galaxy, as yet unexplained.…