Astronomers May Have Found a New Kind of Object Called a 'Black Hole Star' at Cosmic Dawn (zmescience.com)

At first glance, it looked like a star. Then astronomers measured its light and found something no star should be able to do. In striking new images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the object appears as little more than a brilliant red point. Its light carries a signature commonly associated with stellar atmospheres. Yet the source is far too luminous to be an ordinary star. Instead, astronomers argue that they may be seeing a black hole wrapped inside such a dense envelope of hydrogen that the whole structure radiates almost like an enormous star. They call it a “black hole star,” an entirely new type of cosmic object. The object in question, named MoM-BH-1*, existed just 660 million years after the Big Bang. In a new study published in Nature, researchers propose that a young black hole sits inside a turbulent, nearly dust-free cocoon of gas extending tens of astronomical units — roughly the scale of the Solar System. If that interpretation holds up, the discovery could do more than add another exotic object to astronomy’s catalogue. It may help explain the strange “little red dots” that JWST has found in large numbers across the early universe —...