Astronomers published a paper Wednesday in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of an entirely new type of astrophysical object, a "black hole star."
The object, named MoM-BH*-1, was spotted in the early universe 660 million years after the Big Bang by a team led by MIT's Rohan Naidu using the James Webb Space Telescope.
What makes it extraordinary: the object is the size of our solar system and looks like a star, but produces 100 billion times more energy than any star can physically generate. The only thing that can produce that much power is a black hole.
The team's analysis suggests it is a central black hole about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, wrapped in a vast cocoon of hydrogen gas that makes the whole structure look stellar from the outside.
"We have discovered a new type of astrophysical object, a star-black hole," Naidu said.
The finding may solve one of the biggest puzzles of the JWST era. Since the telescope went online in 2022, it has spotted hundreds of mysteriously bright reddish objects in the early universe that astronomers dubbed "little red dots," objects that defied conventional models and appeared impossibly luminous for their age.
The black hole star model now suggests those little red dots may all be black hole stars embedded within early galaxies. "This may be the birth story of possibly every supermassive black hole," Naidu told Gizmodo.
Lead author Naidu compared the discovery's significance to the 1960s and 70s when supermassive black holes were first discovered in the form of quasars. "We are reliving that very special period when we are rewriting the textbooks."