For years, the James Webb Space Telescope has been spotting mysterious, extremely bright red dots scattered across the early universe, objects too luminous to make sense of. This month, a team led by MIT’s Rohan Naidu may have finally figured out what they actually are, and the answer is stranger than anyone expected, a black hole disguised as a star.
A Star That’s 100 Billion Times Too Bright
The object, officially designated MoM-BH*-1, dates back to just 660 million years after the Big Bang and spans roughly the size of our entire solar system, similar in scale to an enormous star. The problem is its brightness, it’s pumping out roughly 100 billion times more energy than any star could physically produce through nuclear fusion. “You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu explained in MIT’s announcement. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”
Nuclear fusion simply can’t scale to that level, but astronomers know something else that can, a black hole actively feeding on surrounding material.
An illustration of a black hole star, a newly proposed class of astrophysical object where a central black hole is wrapped in a dense envelope of hydrogen and helium gas large enough to mimic the appearance of a star. (Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT, based on figures courtesy of the researchers)
Solving It Backward, From the Light Itself
The team’s breakthrough came from studying the object’s exact light pattern. Normally, a reddish glow like this gets blamed on interstellar dust scattering light, similar to smoke turning a sunset deep orange. But the way this particular light dimmed at certain wavelengths didn’t match dust at all, it showed something called a Balmer break, a sharp drop-off caused specifically by dense hydrogen gas absorbing photons, a signature pointing toward something far more exotic than an ordinary dusty galaxy.
Researchers ran simulations incorporating an actively feeding black hole wrapped inside a thick, dust-free cocoon of hydrogen and helium roughly the mass of 100,000 Suns, then compared the resulting brightness against what Webb actually observed. The match was strong enough that the team is now confident they’ve identified a genuinely new class of astrophysical object.
Solving a Puzzle That’s Bothered Astronomers Since 2022
Since Webb went online in 2022, it’s repeatedly spotted these unusually bright, compact red objects in the deep, early universe, nicknamed “little red dots,” and their nature has remained one of the most debated open questions of the entire JWST era. If black hole stars like this one turn out to be common, they could explain something that’s genuinely puzzled scientists, why Webb keeps finding supermassive black holes that grew far too large, far too quickly after the Big Bang for standard growth models to explain. If you’re curious about the quieter, well behaved version of a black hole feeding on far less material, our explainer on what a quasar actually is covers the more established, closely related phenomenon this discovery connects to.
A Merger Already Written Into Its Future
MoM-BH*-1 isn’t isolated either, it sits near a brighter neighboring galaxy, and current models suggest the two are on track to merge within roughly the next 100 million years. Researchers found that combining the light from both objects produces a spectrum strikingly similar to the little red dots Webb has been cataloguing for years, adding real weight to the idea that black hole stars might be the hidden engines powering many of them.
Naidu himself put it simply, “Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly.” Given how quickly this discovery has already reshaped a years-old mystery, that’s likely to remain true for a while yet.
For more on the discovery, check out the original research summary from MIT News and the published study in Nature.
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