You deserve a daily dose of good news. For the latest in science and the night sky, click here to subscribe to our free daily newsletter.
Astronomers discover black hole star, a new type of object!
Since 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been capturing images that reach back to some of the earliest days of the universe. Intriguingly, mysterious Little Red Dots pepper these images. And on August 12, 2026, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said researchers now believe these Little Red Dots are a new type of astronomical object: black hole stars.
These black hole stars would be enormous, about the size of our solar system. And they’d have an energy output 100 billion times greater than any known stars. So, the powerful engine inside is likely a black hole.
Lead author Rohan Naidu of MIT said:
These Little Red Dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day. What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.
Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly. 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.
The researchers published their peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature on August 12, 2026.
From Little Red Dots to black hole stars
We see Little Red Dots roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers first used the word “galaxy” to describe them, but some of them were so small that they only amounted to 2% the radius of our Milky Way.
Astronomers now think these Little Red Dots are a cosmic mashup of a star and a black hole. How would such an object work? The scientists say the star – or giant, dense cloud of gas – is powered not by nuclear fusion, which is a hallmark of stars, but by a central black hole.
Mirage or miracle
The scientists were working on a survey of the most distant and earliest galaxies they could find. They called this survey Mirage or Miracle (MoM). Astronomers have found what appear to be bright galaxies far farther back in time than had been expected. They’ve been puzzled as to how enough stars could have formed in time to build these galaxies. Naidu said:
What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’
So as the scientists pored over Webb images to find distant galaxies, they came across these little red dots. Were these galaxies or something else entirely?
Lots of hydrogen and helium
But when the astronomers looked at the wavelengths of light from these Little Red Dots, they found almost no elements except for hydrogen and helium. And below certain wavelengths, the light all but disappeared. Scientists have seen stars with such ‘breaks’ in their spectrums before, but this one was particularly severe. Naidu said:
The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source. But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.
Why so red?
Co-author Robert Simcoe of MIT said:
When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash. The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.
But with only hydrogen and helium in the spectrum, dust didn’t appear to be the answer this time. Simcoe continued:
We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust? To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.
The black hole star solution
The team used simulations to show a powerful energy source surrounded by dense hydrogen could create the red dot. But the object could only be as bright as they were seeing if that energy source was something as energetic as a black hole. Naidu said:
You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter. 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.
But the simulations worked if they put an active, accreting black hole at the center of a dense hydrogen cocoon. The black hole star solution worked for the specific Little Red Dot they studied, which they’ve named MoM-BH*-1. It’s pronounced black hole star – one. They believe it has a central black hole 100,000 times as massive as the sun. It sits inside a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen about the size of the solar system.
So could black hole stars explain other Little Red Dots in the early universe? The team thinks so. Naidu said:
Every Little Red Dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy. But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.
Bottom line: Astronomers believe the Little Red Dots we see in the early universe are a newly discovered type of object called a black hole star.
Source: A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn
Via MIT