And with all of that in mind, we’re ready to look at what JWST initially saw when it opened its eyes on the distant Universe. In addition to better, more detailed views of objects that we already knew were out there, it discovered an enormous number of objects who were too far away — i.e., whose light was too long-wavelength, due to cosmological redshift — to have been identified and studied before JWST’s unique infrared capabilities. Some of those objects were in-line with what we expected: faint and intrinsically blue, full of young populations of stars that were newly-forming.

But the brightest objects we found at great cosmic distances were these Little Red Dot galaxies (LRDs), and they didn’t line up with our expectations at all.