Some of the mysterious pinpricks of light at the dawn of the Universe could be a type of object we've never seen before.

According to a new analysis of a "little red dot" (LRD) nicknamed The Cliff, these unexplained objects could be supermassive black holes wrapped in huge, dense clouds of gas, like an atmosphere surrounding a stellar core.

It's a very tidy explanation that solves a problem astronomers are struggling to reconcile: a 'break' in the LRDs' light that makes galaxies in the early Universe seem older than possible.

"We … conclude that the rest-optical and near-infrared continuum of The Cliff cannot originate from a massive, evolved stellar population with an extremely high stellar density," writes a team led by astrophysicist Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

"Instead, we argue that the most plausible model is that of a luminous ionising source reddened by dense, absorbing gas in its close vicinity. Currently, the only model capable of producing both the strength and shape of the observed Balmer break is that of a black hole star."

A Balmer break is a sharp change in the spectrum of an object in space occurring in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, where shorter-wavelength light on one side of the line is much lower in intensity than the higher-wavelength light on the other side of the line. This feature is created by the absorption of shorter-wavelength light by hydrogen atoms.

A strong Balmer break is associated with galaxies that have a dominant population of A-type stars, which are just the right temperature to absorb light at the requisite wavelength.

Here's the kicker: to display that strong Balmer break, those galaxies have to be old enough for the earliest dominant population of O and B stars to have largely died off, leaving the A-type stars responsible for most of the galaxy's light, with little to no new star formation.

Many LRDs exhibit a strong Balmer break, at an epoch starting just 600 million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Scientists believe this is too early in the lifespan of the Universe for a galaxy to have reached the stage of a dominant type-A population.

In turn, this has led to some investigation into what these small red lights at the dawn of spacetime might be – from primordial black holes to the seeds of supermassive stars.