Share to ClassroomScientists Find a New Black Hole Star
Astronomers say they have found a new kind of object in space. They call it a black hole star. It is billions of light years from Earth. It formed about 660 million years after the Big Bang, the event that began the universe. Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope show something about as wide as our solar system, glowing deep red. But it produces about 100 billion times more energy than any known star. That is much closer to the power of a black hole.
The team found it by chance. They were looking for the most distant galaxies. Then they studied the reddest point of light in the telescope's photo archive. Normally, red colour in space comes from dust. But this light stopped suddenly below a certain wavelength, and that is a sign of hydrogen gas. Computer models gave an answer. The object is a black hole covered in very thick gas. The gas makes the whole object shine like a star.
Since 2022, the telescope has found strange little red dots in almost every deep photo of the young universe. Nobody knew what they were. Rohan Naidu, who led the study, thinks every one of them is a black hole star. He also thinks these objects may be the early stage of nearly every huge black hole.
