Dr Rohan Naidu said astronomers have found a black hole star around MoM-BH*-1, an extremely bright red source about 30bn light years from Earth. The object sits in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, and may date to 660m years after the big bang.
Naidu said, "We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star," and added that it "shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars." He said the object's light is almost entirely red and that it abruptly disappears below a certain wavelength.
James Webb space telescope
The international team reached that conclusion after focusing on a mysterious red spot in images captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. Computer simulations showed that MoM-BH*-1 is a black hole swaddled in shrouds of dense gas that radiates like a star, rather than a normal star powered by nuclear fusion.
The measurement that drove the claim is stark: the object releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. Naidu said the energy output is far closer to what is observed from black holes than from stars, and the finding was published in Nature.
Little Red Dots
The object fits within the class of Little Red Dots, or LRDs, that appear in nearly every deep space image from the James Webb space telescope. Naidu said black hole stars may be "the nascent, swaddled phase that marks the beginning of almost every supermassive black hole's journey," and may help explain how those objects grow in the early universe.
He also said they may govern when stars are able to form and when they cease forming, shaping what follows from star formation. For now, MoM-BH*-1 gives astronomers a named target to test against other LRDs in James Webb data, and the open question is whether they turn out to be black hole stars too.
