Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2026

39 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 dot-like center that is reminiscent of the ruby red fruit produced by the desert plant. “Everything created in the early uni- verse must evolve into something around us. We have had little idea of what LRDs become, but these re- sults finally show us how to find their progeny,” said co-author George Rieke of the University of Arizona. Previous studies by NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope pro- vided the first hint of the dust-ob- scured, compact galaxy population in the lower-redshift universe that the Saguaro belongs to, paving the S cientists have proposed one pathway little red dots can follow as the universe matures based on their analysis of spiral galaxy WISEA J123635.56+621424.2, nicknamed the “Saguaro.” They suggest little red dots may be a temporary phase of highly active supermassive black holes. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Pierluigi Rinal- di (Steward Observatory); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)] Center for Astrophysics in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, and a co-au- thor of the study. Among the thousands of sources Ri- naldi looked at across several sur- veys, the Saguaro was an example of the right place — with one of Webb’s microshutter arrays perfectly framed over the galaxy’s core to take spectroscopic data — and right time way for NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes’ high-resolu- tion analyses. “The Saguaro is important because it’s a prototypical little red dot and is one of the few we have found at lower redshift. It can be used to study the pathway of these dots throughout cosmic time,” said Fabio Pacucci of the Harvard-Smithsonian