Astronomers Discover New Cosmic Object: Black Hole Star

The team had originally been hunting the most distant galaxies in the universe. Having confirmed one named MoM-z14, which took shape just 280 million years after the Big Bang, the astronomers turned to the reddest point of light anywhere in the telescope's archive of images. Such redness is usually blamed on dust: co-author Robert Simcoe, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared it to Canadian wildfire smoke turning the sky over Boston red. Instead, the data showed the object's light cutting off sharply beneath a particular wavelength, a signature of hydrogen gas rather than dust. Computer simulations indicated that the body is not powered by nuclear fusion, the engine of ordinary stars, but by a central black hole wrapped in a gas shroud so thick that the whole object shines as a star would. Accounts of the lead author's affiliation differ: the Guardian places Rohan Naidu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while CBS News identifies him with the University of Hawaii.

If the interpretation holds, it would resolve one of the most contested puzzles of the Webb era. Since the telescope began observing in 2022, it has detected enigmatic "little red dots" in almost every deep image of the early universe. Naidu argues that every one of them is consistent with being a black hole star, and that such objects may represent the swaddled infancy of nearly every supermassive black hole, including the one at the heart of the Milky Way. Because supermassive black holes are thought to regulate when galaxies form stars, the finding could reshape accounts of how galaxies, planets and ultimately life emerged.