Our astronomers are part of an international team which has discovered a new object – a mash-up of a black hole and an enormous star.
The new “black hole star” could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep space.
The object looks like an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system.
But it is also putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star – closer to the energy generated by a black hole.
Researchers in our Department of Physics/Institute for Computational Cosmology were involved in the discovery made using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Our role was to provide some of the theoretical interpretation of the new data being uncovered by the JWST.
The JWST spotted the bright red dot in the very early Universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Scientists’ most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mix of a black hole and a star – a combination that has never been seen before.
The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.
If the bright red dot is a black hole star, it could solve the identity of other mysterious little red dots seen in nearly every deep space image the JWST has taken.
The team ran computer simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.
The simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being a powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by extremely dense hydrogen, but this didn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.
Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed.
The team incorporated an active, growing black hole into their simulations and varied its mass and other parameters.
They compared the resulting brightness of the simulated black hole star with that seen through the JWST.
The simulations provided the closest match, with the team concluding that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star.
The object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the Sun, surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of our solar system.
The team named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it. Its name also implies that the object is the first of others.
Read the full research paper in the journal Nature.
Durham University’s role was led by Professor Sownak Bose in our Department of Physics/Institute for Computational Cosmology.
Our Department of Physics is ranked joint 67th in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026 and fourth in the UK in the Complete University Guide 2027. Visit our Physics webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
The research was led by MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Main image: Astronomers have discovered a “black hole star,” an extremely bright red spot in the early Universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object. It resembles an enormous star, but its energy production is closer to what a black hole might generate. Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT.
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