Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, Nov 07, 2025
Little Red Dots and the mystery of supermassive black hole formation
Prof. Phil Armitage
One of the most surprising discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope has been the “Little Red Dots”: compact, red, sources at high redshift that resemble neither galaxies nor nearby examples of accreting black holes. They may shed clues to the mystery of how the seeds of the supermassive black holes, that now inhabit the centers of almost all galaxies, formed. I will discuss these problems, and an idea we are working on that suggests Little Red Dots might be “quasi-stars”: black holes growing furiously within enormous star-like envelopes.
Prof. Phil Armitage is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in Manhattan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1996, and was a Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, prior to joining Stony Brook in 2018. His research focuses on theoretical and computational studies of planet formation, and on the astrophysics of black holes.
