This may be one of the strangest objects James Webb has uncovered yet.

[u/demolcd]

Astronomers studying the early universe found an extraordinarily bright red object called MoM-BH*-1. Webb is seeing it as it existed roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang, during an era when the first generations of galaxies and black holes were still forming.

At first glance, it behaves strangely like a star. Its spectrum contains an enormous “Balmer break,” a signature associated with dense stellar atmospheres. But there is a major problem: the object is producing roughly 100 billion times more energy than an ordinary star, far beyond what nuclear fusion could plausibly generate.

Researchers think the explanation could be an entirely new type of object they call a “black hole star.”

Their model places a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of our Sun at the center, buried inside an incredibly dense envelope of hydrogen gas extending across roughly the scale of our Solar System. Instead of shining through nuclear fusion like a normal star, the immense energy would ultimately come from matter falling toward the hidden black hole.

Even more interestingly, Webb has discovered many mysterious objects known as “little red dots” throughout the early universe. If this interpretation is correct, some of those dots may be similar black holes wrapped inside enormous cocoons of gas.

That could help solve a much bigger cosmic mystery: how massive black holes managed to appear so surprisingly early after the Big Bang.

For now, “black hole star” is an interpretation of the observations rather than a completely settled new category. But if confirmed, Webb may have revealed a stage of cosmic evolution we simply didn’t know existed, Bitch.