Rohan Naidu said astronomers have found a new kind of cosmic object in stars data from the James Webb space telescope: a black hole star. The object is MoM-BH*-1, a brilliant red source seen billions of light years from Earth and thought to have formed 660 million years after the big bang.
Naidu, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star,” after the team focused on the object in images from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope. Measurements found that it releases 100 billion times more energy than any known star can produce.
MoM-BH*-1 and Little Red Dots
The team had been using the James Webb space telescope to search for the most distant galaxies in the known universe when it found Mom-z14, a galaxy that formed 280 million years after the big bang. After that, the astronomers turned to other cosmic objects and zeroed in on MoM-BH*-1, described as the reddest object in the telescope’s image archive. In the article published in Nature, Naidu said the object’s light is almost entirely red and abruptly disappears below a certain wavelength. Bay FC Vs Chicago Stars
Computer simulations showed the object is a black hole swaddled in dense gas that radiates like a star. That is the contradiction at the center of the finding: it shines with the energy usually tied to black holes, while also carrying signatures classically associated with stars. If the astronomers are right, scores of other mysterious Little Red Dots, or LRDs, may also be black hole stars. Candace Parker stars
Nature and the Milky Way
Naidu said black hole stars may be the nascent, swaddled phase that marks the beginning of almost every supermassive black hole’s journey. He also said they may govern when stars are able to form and when they cease forming, shaping what follows from star formation, including the birth of planets and the rise of life. The same line of thought points to the object as a possible seed for present-day supermassive black holes, including the one at the centre of the Milky Way. Chicago Stars Vs Racing Louisville
The next step is to sort out how many of the Little Red Dots in James Webb data belong to this class. The open question left by the discovery is the physics itself: what process lets a black hole wrapped in dense gas radiate so much like a star.
