Scientists have discovered a wholly new category of cosmic object: the "black hole star." Spotted with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and described in the journal Nature, the object—designated MoM-BH*-1—glows a brilliant red and stretches across a distance equivalent to our entire solar system, yet radiates energy at a scale seen only from black holes.
Dr. Rohan Naidu of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research led the team that made the breakthrough. The object resides in the constellation Cetus and is thought to have formed around 660 million years after the Big Bang, placing it deep in the universe's earliest epoch.
"We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star," Naidu said. "It shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars."
The researchers stumbled upon it while hunting for the most distant galaxies known to science. After succeeding with Mom-z14—a galaxy that formed just 280 million years after the Big Bang—they turned their attention to MoM-BH*-1, the reddest object in JWST's entire image archive. Its colour profile, Naidu noted, was unlike anything previously catalogued: "The way its light is almost entirely red, and abruptly disappears below a certain wavelength, is so dramatic that there is no comparison among any known class of objects."
Measurements confirmed that while MoM-BH*-1 resembles an immense star on the surface, it releases 100 billion times more energy than any known star can produce—an output far closer to what scientists expect from supermassive black holes. Computer simulations suggest the object is a black hole so thoroughly swaddled in dense shrouds of gas and dust that it radiates outward like a star, masking its true nature.
Seeds of Supermassive Black Holes
If the interpretation holds, it carries profound implications for our understanding of galaxy formation. Naidu believes that scores of other mysterious "Little Red Dots" (LRDs)—faint, ultra-red blobs that appear in nearly every JWST deep-space image—may also be black hole stars, previously misclassified or simply unrecognised.
"For decades we have anticipated something spectacular must be afoot in the very early universe," Naidu said. "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."
Supermassive black holes are found at the centres of virtually every large galaxy, including our own Milky Way, and are thought to sculpt the fate of their host galaxies—regulating when stars can form and when star formation ceases. If black hole stars are their seeds, then these objects were present at the very dawn of the cosmos, shaping everything that followed: planets, life, and ultimately curious species like ours who look back and try to piece together the story.
A Window Into the Earliest Universe
The discovery is emblematic of JWST's transformative power. Where previous telescopes could only hint at what lay in the universe's first billion years, JWST is now unveiling it in extraordinary detail. MoM-BH*-1 would have been invisible to its predecessors; only JWST's unprecedented infrared sensitivity made detection possible.
The findings, published in Nature on 12 August 2026, open a new chapter in cosmic cartography. The team says further spectroscopic follow-up observations will help confirm whether other LRDs share the same properties. If they do, it would mean that black hole stars were not a quirk of one unusual corner of the cosmos but a common, defining feature of the universe's infancy.
What remains extraordinary is the simplicity of the core insight: that the universe, in its youth, harboured objects that blurred the boundary between stars and black holes in ways that no existing theory fully predicted—a reminder that even with the most powerful space telescope ever built, the cosmos still holds surprises.
