Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star
Researchers confirm a new type of cosmic object called a 'black hole star' using JWST.
The James Webb Space Telescope has identified a supermassive black hole enshrouded in dense gas that radiates with the intensity of a star, confirming the existence of a new astrophysical object dubbed a ‘black hole star’. Working within the Mirage or Miracle survey, a team led by Rohan Naidu at MIT located this object in data tracing back to just 660 million years after the Big Bang, revealing a compact mass that is completely hidden behind a cloud of accreting material. Instead of appearing as a dark void against background emission, the gas envelope surrounding the black hole produces radiation patterns that mimic those of a stellar body, creating a class of object that blurs the traditional distinction between star-like luminescence and black hole dynamics.
The physical scale of MoM-BH*-1 underscores how compact and energetic this enshrouded phase can be before it evolves into a visible active galaxy. Independent reporting from ABC News highlighted the object’s unusual metrics, noting that it contains roughly a million solar masses hidden within a cloud spanning the size of our own solar system. This dense configuration allows the central singularity to channel energy outward at extreme levels, outputting radiation 100 billion times more powerful than that of any known star while keeping the core itself obscured from direct view.
The classification has drawn attention from astronomers outside the discovery team for what it implies about black hole growth in the early universe. Uninvolved researchers Nicholas Seymour and Christian Wolf have described MoM-BH*-1 as a ‘supermassive black hole teenager,’ a designation that emphasizes its youth relative to the massive black holes anchoring modern galaxies. The term points to an object caught during a rapid accretion phase, where the surrounding gas provides both the fuel for growth and the shroud that masks high-energy signatures, suggesting that these ‘black hole stars’ may represent a common transient stage rather than an isolated anomaly in cosmic history.
Identifying this class requires disentangling the diffuse glow of the enshrouding gas from point sources like background stars, a capability that relies on JWST’s sensitivity and the analytical framework of the Mirage or Miracle survey. The findings were published in Nature, with the MIT-led work confirming that the signal matches the predicted output of a supermassive black hole accreting material while remaining hidden within its own accretion disk. This confirmation rules out alternative explanations involving star-forming regions or foreground contamination, establishing that the observed luminosity and spectral features arise directly from the interaction between dense gas and a central gravitational well in the infant cosmos.
As a result of this discovery, astronomers now have a defined template for searching similar objects across the survey data, focusing on the specific combination of stellar-like radiation and the absence of characteristic black hole emissions usually seen when accretion disks are exposed. If MoM-BH*-1 is representative, it suggests that supermassive black holes can grow to million-solar-mass scales within gas-rich environments long before they break out of their shrouds to become bright quasars. This extends the timeline for structural formation in the first billion years, indicating that the seeds of galaxy centers were processing vast amounts of mass through enshrouded phases that earlier surveys likely missed due to their reliance on detection methods tuned for unobscured activity.
The confirmation of MoM-BH*-1 as a ‘black hole star’ closes a gap in the catalog of early-universe objects by demonstrating how black holes can hide in plain sight during their most active growth periods. Measurements showing an energy output of 100 billion times that of any star combined with the object’s compact, solar-system-sized envelope highlight the diversity of accretion environments available in the cosmological dawn. With Naidu and colleagues having established this category in Nature, future observations can now target the population frequency of these enshrouded objects to better map how supermassive black holes assembled their mass in the era just after recombination.