An international team led by Dr Rohan Naidu at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MIT) says it has identified a new cosmic object, MoM-BH*-1, which it calls a black hole "star." MoM-BH*-1 is roughly the size of the entire solar system, appears as an intensely red source in James Webb Space Telescope images, and lies in the constellation Cetus billions of light years from Earth. The object formed about 660 million years after the Big Bang and emits roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star. The authors published their findings in Nature and report that computer simulations best match a black hole enshrouded in very dense gas that radiates with stellar signatures rather than a fusion-powered star. The team notes MoM-BH*-1 is the reddest object in the telescope's archive and suggests many other Little Red Dots in deep images may be similar black hole stars. The researchers propose black hole stars could be the nascent, shrouded phase that seeds supermassive black holes and influences early galaxy evolution, potentially shaping when and where stars form.
