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The Royal Astronomical Society has announced the winner of the 2026 MNRAS Student Author Prize — and it’s a paper that tries to make sense of one of the most puzzling discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Daisaburo Kido, a student at the University of Tokyo, took home the award for the paper “Black Hole Envelopes in Little Red Dots” (co-authored with Kunihito Ioka, Kenta Hotokezaka, Kohei Inayoshi and Christopher M. Irwin).

What’s the Big Deal with Little Red Dots?

Little Red Dots (or LRDs) are compact, extremely red objects that JWST has been spotting in the early universe. They don’t behave like normal galaxies or quasars, and astronomers have been scratching their heads over what they actually are.

Kido’s team proposes a neat idea: these objects may be powered by black holes that are surrounded by a thick