Pys.org – Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, roughly the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.
The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”
In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, the team presents its analysis of the new object, which it discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star—a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion but by a central black hole.
“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”
If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep-space image JWST has taken to date.
“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”
The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics, and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.
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