An international team led from the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT identified an object they call a black hole “star” labeled MoM-BH*-1 in the constellation Cetus. The body is roughly the size of the entire solar system, glows an intense red, and lies billions of light years from Earth; the team reports it formed about 660 million years after the big bang. MoM-BH*-1 emits roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star, a power output the authors say matches black holes while its spectrum shows signatures normally associated with stars. The discovery came from reexamining the reddest spot in James Webb Space Telescope images and is described in Nature. Computer simulations indicate the object is a black hole enshrouded in very dense gas that reprocesses radiation so the system radiates like a star. The team suggests many of the “Little Red Dots” seen across deep JWST images could be similar black hole stars. If so, these swaddled black holes may be the nascent phase that seeds supermassive black holes and influences early galaxy evolution, including when and where stars form, the authors say.
