Rohan Naidu said astronomers have made a black hole discovery after studying MoM-BH*-1, a brilliant red object in James Webb space telescope images that may be a new kind of cosmic body. The team said the source is about the size of the entire solar system and glows billions of light years from Earth.
Naidu, of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the object releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. He said it sits in Cetus, the Whale, and may have formed 660m years after the big bang.
MoM-BH*-1 in James Webb images
The scientists were using James Webb to find the most distant galaxies in the known universe when they focused on an extremely bright red spot they called MoM-BH*-1. Naidu said it is the reddest object in the telescope archive, and said the light is “almost entirely red” before it “abruptly disappears below a certain wavelength.”
That signal set MoM-BH*-1 apart from the other Little Red Dots, or LRDs, seen in deep space images. The team said the object shines with the energy usually associated with black holes while still showing signatures classically associated with stars.
Rohan Naidu and Nature
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.” The findings were written up in Nature.
He also said, “For decades we have anticipated something spectacular must be afoot in the very early universe. Black hole stars may be the ‘something spectacular’. They may be the nascent, swaddled phase that marks the beginning of almost every supermassive black hole’s journey.”
Little Red Dots and BH
Computer simulations led the team to a black hole wrapped in dense gas, not a normal star powered by nuclear fusion. The object resembles an immense star at first glance, but the measurements point to a BH surrounded by shrouds of gas that radiate like a star.
The scientists said scores of other Little Red Dots may also turn out to be black hole stars. Naidu said such objects may be the seeds of present-day supermassive black holes, including the one at the centre of the Milky Way, and he said those black holes are found at the centres of almost all galaxies and help shape their fate.
That leaves the next step in the search: testing more LRDs against the same mix of image data and simulations to see how common this type of object really is.
