Astronomers Discover New Object: The Black Hole Star

The scientists were not looking for it. They were searching for the most distant galaxies in the universe, and they then turned to the reddest spot in the telescope's picture archive. Astronomers usually explain such redness with dust. Robert Simcoe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) compared this to smoke from Canadian wildfires, which turned the sky over Boston red. But the data showed the object's light stopping suddenly below a certain wavelength, a sign of hydrogen gas rather than dust. Computer models suggested the object is not burning fuel like a normal star. Instead, it is a black hole wrapped in gas so thick that the whole thing glows like a star.

If the team is right, the discovery would answer one of the biggest questions of the Webb era. Since the telescope started work in 2022, it has found strange "little red dots" in almost every deep picture of the young universe. Lead author Rohan Naidu believes each of these dots could be a black hole star, and that such objects may be the first stage of nearly every supermassive black hole.