JWST spots a bizarre "black hole star" 100 billion times brighter than a star (sciencedaily.com)

That unusual combination has led researchers to propose that the red object represents an entirely new kind of astrophysical source. They are calling it a "black hole star." A study published on August 12 in Nature describes the object and the team's analysis of observations made with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope detected the bright red dot in the very early universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. A Black Hole Hidden Inside a Giant Star Like Cocoon The researchers say the most likely explanation is a previously unseen combination of a black hole and a star. Instead of being powered by the nuclear fusion that fuels ordinary stars, the object may consist of an extremely dense cloud of gas energized by a black hole at its center. "Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly," says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). "We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the Sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like...