Astronomers have identified what they believe is an entirely new kind of astrophysical object: a “black hole star.” The object, named MoM-BH*-1, appears as a very bright, very red point of light in the early universe, roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang. It has been described in a paper recently published in the journal Nature by a team led by researchers at MIT.
The source looks like an enormous star, spanning roughly the size of our solar system. But it produces around 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically generate, a level closer to what a black hole might emit. The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that the object is a dense cloud of hydrogen gas powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.
Lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said the team’s understanding is still developing. “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the Sun,” Naidu said. “And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”
The object was found by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope during a survey called 'Mirage or Miracle', which was designed to search for the most distant galaxies. It stood out because it was unusually red and bright. Its light contains almost no elements other than hydrogen and helium, and it shows the deepest hydrogen absorption feature, known as a Balmer break, that the team has ever observed. That rules out ordinary stars.
The researchers simulated different scenarios to see what could explain the object's brightness and colour. The model that best matched the data was this: a feeding black hole at the centre, surrounded by a thick, dense shell of hydrogen gas. In this explanation, the black hole works like the nuclear fusion engine inside a normal star, and the surrounding gas behaves like a star's atmosphere. That is the "picture" the sentence refers to.
The findings could also help solve a separate puzzle. Astronomers have found many faint “little red dots” in deep space images from JWST. These objects appear in the early universe but are absent today, and their nature has been hotly debated. “These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu said. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”
The team suspects that many of those little red dots are also black hole stars. MoM-BH*-1 is special because its black hole star completely outshines its surrounding host galaxy, allowing astronomers to see the object’s light almost on its own. The paper is titled 'A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn'. The research was supported in part by MIT, NASA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
