Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they have identified a genuinely new kind of cosmic object: a black hole wrapped so densely in gas that it glows like a star the size of our entire solar system, yet radiates roughly 100 billion times more energy than any star could physically produce. The team, led by MIT's Rohan Naidu, is calling it a "black hole star," and describes the discovery in a paper published in Nature.
The object, cataloged as MoM-BH*-1, appears as it was just 660 million years after the Big Bang — one of the earliest such objects ever observed. Webb's spectroscopy shows a source with an unusually extreme "Balmer break," a spectral fingerprint of dense surrounding gas, along with broad, multi-peaked hydrogen emission lines that don't match any known type of star or ordinary quasar. Modeling that signature, the researchers concluded the only explanation that fits is a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the sun, shrouded in an extended envelope of hydrogen gas about as wide as our solar system, which reprocesses the black hole's radiation into a star-like glow.
Solving the "little red dot" puzzle
The discovery may resolve one of the more stubborn mysteries Webb has turned up since it began operating: so-called "little red dots," compact, reddish sources found in nearly every deep Webb image of the early universe, whose nature has divided astronomers since 2022. "Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy," Naidu said, according to MIT News. If that holds up, black hole stars could be common rather than a cosmic oddity.
The finding also speaks to a longstanding puzzle in cosmology: how supermassive black holes weighing a billion suns or more managed to grow so large within the universe's first billion years, far faster than standard growth models allow. A black hole hidden inside a dense gas cocoon could feed at rates well above the theoretical limit for unobscured black holes, because the surrounding gas traps radiation that would otherwise blow infalling material away — offering a possible shortcut to the earliest giant black holes known.
We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun.
Rohan Naidu, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
The result builds on independent modeling from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, whose researchers reached a similar conclusion analyzing the same class of object, according to an ISTA news release, strengthening confidence that the "black hole star" interpretation is not an artifact of one team's analysis. Both groups caution that competing explanations, including heavily dust-reddened active galaxies, have not been fully ruled out.
Follow-up observations are already planned to test the idea further, including deeper spectroscopy to search for the gas envelope's predicted absorption features in other candidate red dots. If confirmed across a larger sample, astronomers say black hole stars could become one of the standard tools for tracing how the universe's first giant black holes came to be.
