Astronomers have described a class of object that should not, by conventional accounting, exist: something the size of our solar system that looks like an enormous star but radiates 100 billion times more energy than any star can physically produce.

The object, designated MoM-BH*-1, was found in James Webb Space Telescope data by an international team led by Rohan Naidu and Jorryt Matthee, working with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, MIT and other institutions. The findings were published in Nature. The team calls it a “black hole star.” The light reaching us was emitted 13 billion years ago, when the universe was 660 million years old.

What it appears to be

Three categories are being blended here, so it is worth separating them.

A star is a dense ball of gas powered by nuclear fusion in its core. A black hole normally grows by pulling in matter through a flattened accretion disc, which radiates fiercely as material heats on the way in. A black hole star, on this interpretation, is a third thing: a rapidly growing black hole completely wrapped in a dense cloud of gas, so that what an observer sees is the enveloping gas glowing rather than the black hole itself.

That explains the contradiction. The object presents a star-like appearance because you are looking at a vast shell of gas. The energy output is not stellar because fusion is not what is powering it.

Two further observations support the reading. Astronomers detected none of the heavy elements that mature stars produce — only hydrogen and helium, as expected in the early universe. And other signatures did not match the competing explanation, that the redness comes from ordinary dust.

The little red dots

The finding matters mainly because of a puzzle it may resolve. Since Webb began observing in 2022, nearly every deep image has contained small red objects in the early universe that nobody could classify — the “little red dots.” Naidu has described what they are as one of the most debated questions of the Webb era. They appear everywhere in the young universe and essentially vanish by the present day.

The team’s proposal is that every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star embedded in an ordinary early galaxy. What makes MoM-BH*-1 useful is that the object outshines its host galaxy so completely that astronomers are seeing the phenomenon essentially unobstructed.

Why anyone should care about the early universe

There is a genuine problem in cosmology that this speaks to. Black holes of a billion solar masses have been observed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Growing one that large that fast is difficult under standard models, because ordinary accretion has a speed limit — radiation pressure from infalling matter pushes away further material.

A black hole enshrouded in dense gas offers a way around that. The surrounding envelope can hold material in place and allow the black hole to feed far faster than it otherwise could. If black hole stars are common at cosmic dawn, the timeline problem eases.

The appropriate caution

The survey that found it was called “Mirage or Miracle” for a reason: it was designed to chase objects that might be spectacular discoveries or might be nearby cold stars masquerading as distant galaxies. The team was not looking for this — they were hunting the earliest galaxies, and the same survey yielded the most distant galaxy confirmed to date.

This is one object, and its interpretation depends on modelling that other groups will now test. The phrase used by the researchers is “if the interpretation is correct.” Announcing a new class of astrophysical object on a single example is how such classes usually begin, and also how some of them quietly end.

Sources

Naidu et al., “A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn,” Nature, vol. 656, 2026; MIT News and Institute of Science and Technology Austria announcements; coverage by CBS News, Phys.org and Nautilus.