Astronomers Discover a 'Black Hole Star' — a New Cosmic Object the Size of the Solar System

An MIT-led team using JWST found a red object 100 billion times brighter than any known star, formed 660 million years after the Big Bang — a black hole swaddled in a cocoon of hydrogen.

Astronomers have found a genuinely new kind of object in the universe — a "black hole star" that is the size of our entire solar system and glows a deep, brilliant red.

The discovery, published in Nature, came from an MIT-led team using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. While hunting for the earliest galaxies in a survey called "Mirage or Miracle," lead author Rohan Naidu noticed one source that looked especially strange: intensely red, extraordinarily bright, and showing almost no trace of anything except hydrogen and helium.

The object, named MoM-BH*-1 and lurking in the constellation Cetus, releases roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce — levels far closer to a black hole. The team's models point to a central black hole about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, swaddled in a cocoon of hydrogen gas so dense it radiates like a star. Unlike ordinary stars, it isn't powered by nuclear fusion. "It shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars," Naidu told The Guardian.

If the interpretation holds, the discovery could crack one of the biggest mysteries of the JWST era: the "little red dots" that appear in nearly every deep-space image yet vanish by the present day. Naidu suspects these too are black hole stars — and that such objects may be the seeds of the supermassive black holes now sitting at the center of nearly every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Sources: Nature | The Guardian | ScienceDaily