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Astronomers claim to have discovered a new kind of cosmic object, a black hole “star”, which is the size of the entire solar system and glows with a brilliant red light.
The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early solar system captured by Nasa’s James Webb space telescope.
The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light years from Earth. It is thought to have formed 660m years after the big bang, astronomers’ leading theory as to how the universe began.
Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars.
“We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star,” said Dr Rohan Naidu at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It “shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars”, he added.
The scientists were using the James Webb space telescope to find the most distant galaxies in the known universe. After succeeding with a galaxy named Mom-z14, which formed a mere 280m years after the big bang, they turned their attention to other cosmic objects.
Writing in Nature, the astronomers describe how they focused on an extremely bright red spot known as MoM-BH*-1, the reddest object in the telescope’s image archive.
“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,” Naidu said.
Computer simulations showed that rather than being an enormous star powered by nuclear fusion, the object is a black hole so swaddled in shrouds of dense gas that it radiates like a star.
If the astronomers are correct, it suggests that scores of other mysterious Little Red Dots, or LRDs, that appear in nearly every deep space image from the James Webb space telescope are also black hole stars.
Naidu suspects that black hole stars play a major role in the evolution of galaxies. They might be the seeds of present-day supermassive black holes, such as the one at the centre of the Milky Way.
“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,” he said.
Supermassive black holes are found at the centres of almost all galaxies such as the Milky Way and are thought to shape the fate of those galaxies.
“They may govern when stars are able to form and when they cease forming, setting the course for everything that follows from star formation: the birth of planets, the rise of life, the emergence of species that may one day piece together this entire history,” Naidu said.
