Black holes and stars are two different things, except when suddenly they aren’t.
a team of MIT researchers recently found and described in the journal Nature. The object, called MoM-BH*-1, may be an entirely new kind of cosmic entity: a “black hole star.” The discovery began with the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been finding mysterious little red dots all over the early universe.
Researchers thought these objects were distant galaxies or stars obscured by dust. Then they found one that didn’t meet any previously established criteria. That would be the unpronounceable MoM-BH*-1, a cosmic object so bright that it’s about 100 billion times brighter than any ordinary star, but its light has the characteristics of dense stellar gas.
Another weird thing: it’s made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
Astronomers May Have Found a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole Star
It was unlike anything observed before, so researchers ran some simulations to try to find some answers as to what this thing was. At the center of it is apparently a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, which is surrounded by a massive cocoon of dense hydrogen about the size of our solar system. That black hole feeds the object with energy, while the gas around it makes the whole thing look like a gigantic red star to us.
It’s a black hole surrounded by something that is kind of like a star but is not a star, but definitely has star vibes.
It’s a big discovery that could explain the mystery of the red dots the JWST keeps finding as it appears backward in time. These black hole stars could represent an early stage in the development of the supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies, like the one sitting at the center of our own.
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