A Tiny Red Dot Shining in the Baby Universe Turns Out to Be a Black Hole Star

For four years, astronomers have puzzled over the “little red dots” appearing across James Webb Space Telescope images of the early universe. One of the brightest has now offered a possible answer: it may be a black hole hidden inside a star-like shell of gas.

An international research team led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified the object, officially named MoM-BH*-1, in observations from a time 660 million years after the Big Bang. The team described it in the journal Nature as a new type of object with properties of both a star and a black hole.

The object looks like a huge star about the size of the solar system, but it produces 100 billion times more energy than any known star. Scientists said nuclear fusion could not account for that output. Instead, they concluded that a black hole with a mass about 100,000 times that of the Sun sits at the center, surrounded by an extremely dense layer of gas.

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At the center is a massive black hole with a mass 100,000 times that of the Sun, surrounded by a very thick gas layer the size of the solar system.

“ at the center is a massive black hole with a mass 100,000 times that of the Sun, surrounded by a very thick gas layer the size of the solar system,” said lead author Rohan Naidu. The gas makes the black hole appear to shine like a star’s surface.

The team found the object while searching for the most distant galaxies in the “Mirage or Miracle” project. Its red color initially suggested heavy dust, which often absorbs more blue light. But the spectrum showed an extremely dense gas cloud instead, containing little beyond hydrogen and helium. Light also disappeared below a particular wavelength, a pattern associated with dense gas absorbing photons in a stellar atmosphere.

Researchers said black hole stars may once have been common in the early universe but are now rare. They may have formed when massive stars, themselves created through rapid collisions in globular clusters, merged and produced black holes surrounded by dense gas. The researchers said MoM-BH*-1 is an unusually clear case because its light overwhelms the surrounding galaxy.

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These black hole stars were widespread in the early universe but have almost disappeared today.