{"id":10214,"date":"2026-08-17T09:03:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=10214"},"modified":"2026-08-17T09:03:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:03:02","slug":"astronomers-discover-a-brand-new-type-of-astrophysical-object-a-black-hole-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/?p=10214","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Discover a Brand-New Type of Astrophysical Object: a Black Hole Star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>The mashup of a black hole and an enormous star has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep-space images<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 700px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/mediasvc.eurekalert.org\/Api\/v1\/Multimedia\/196da511-7b41-40dd-8566-25ed9793d019\/Rendition\/low-res\/Content\/Public\" width=\"700\" height=\"467\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Astronomers have discovered a \u201cblack hole star,\u201d an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object. It resembles an enormous star, but its energy production is closer to what a black hole might generate.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Astronomers have discovered a \u201cblack hole star,\u201d an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object.<\/li>\n<li>It resembles an enormous star, but its energy production is closer to what a black hole might generate.<\/li>\n<li>This finding could help solve the identity of other mysterious \u201clittle red dots\u201d that have appeared in nearly every deep space image NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope has taken to date.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.<\/p>\n<p>The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a \u201cblack hole star.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10846-4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">paper<\/a> appearing in the journal\u00a0<em>Nature<\/em>, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n<p>The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star \u2014 a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,\u201d says lead author Rohan Naidu, a\u00a0NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at\u00a0MIT\u2019s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). \u201cWe think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. 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\u2019s huge.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious \u201clittle red dots\u201d that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cWhat exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The study\u2019s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun \u201926, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A singular source<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Naidu and his colleagues didn\u2019t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named \u201cMirage or Miracle\u201d (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cWhat we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a \u2018miracle,\u2019 in some cases actually could be a \u2018mirage.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As they looked through JWST\u2019s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,\u201d Simcoe explains. \u201cThe same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But there were other signatures in the light that didn\u2019t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot\u2019s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared.<\/p>\n<p>This spectral drop-off is\u00a0known as a \u201cBalmer break\u201d \u2014 a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out \u2018ordinary\u2019 stars as the source,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cBut it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of \u2018stellar atmosphere,\u2019 but on a spectacular scale.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s more, the red dot\u2019s light\u00a0contained almost no signature\u00a0of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. \u201cIt was truly singular in so many ways,\u201d Naidu says.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pure light<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot\u2019s distinctive color.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?\u201d Simcoe says. \u201cTo our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn\u2019t explain the object\u2019s extreme brightness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cThat means you can\u2019t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole\u2019s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated \u201cblack hole star\u201d with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.<\/p>\n<p>From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.<\/p>\n<p>The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker \u201cblack hole star \u2013 one,\u201d which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEvery little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,\u201d Naidu says. \u201cBut what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we\u2019re seeing pure black hole star light.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <em>Jennifer Chu, MIT News<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The mashup of a black hole and an enormous star has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep-space images Astronomers have discovered a \u201cblack hole star,\u201d an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object. It&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":10215,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mediasvc.eurekalert.org\/Api\/v1\/Multimedia\/196da511-7b41-40dd-8566-25ed9793d019\/Rendition\/low-res\/Content\/Public","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10216,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10214\/revisions\/10216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceandplanetarynewswire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}