A tiny blob of red light spotted at the beginning of the Universe could represent the first direct evidence for a supermassive black hole formation pathway.

In a dazzling new paper, a large international team led by astrophysicist Ignas Juodžbalis of the University of Cambridge in the UK has directly measured the mass of one of the mysterious 'Little Red Dots' (LRDs) spotted by JWST in the Epoch of Reionization, just 600 million years after the Big Bang .

The team's results suggest that the mysterious glow named QSO1 is a black hole with a mass equivalent to 50 million Suns. If validated – and that's not a small if – this could be evidence of primordial black holes that formed in the very first moments after the Big Bang.

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