JWST Spots a 'Black Hole Star' 100 Billion Times Brighter Than Any True Star Should Be

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a compact, star-like object in the young universe so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot explain it. The object, named MoM-BH*-1, radiates roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically produce, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

The leading explanation is that the glow comes from a rapidly feeding black hole buried inside an enormous, dense envelope of hydrogen gas — a type of object astronomers are calling a "black hole star." Lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said the central black hole appears to be about 100,000 times as massive as the sun, surrounded by a gas envelope roughly the size of the solar system.

Naidu and colleagues found MoM-BH*-1 while searching for extremely distant galaxies through a JWST program called "Mirage or Miracle" (MoM). Spectroscopy placed the object at a redshift of about 7.76, meaning it is seen as it existed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, in the era known as cosmic dawn.

The object's spectrum contained an unusually abrupt drop in light called a Balmer break, measured at a strength of about 7.7 — far stronger than ordinary dust-free stellar populations can produce, the researchers said. Its spectrum also showed little evidence of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

MoM-BH*-1 belongs to a broader population JWST has repeatedly found in the distant universe, known as "little red dots" — extremely compact, extremely common sources in early-universe images that show signs of actively feeding black holes but effectively disappear from observations by the present day.