When Soundgarden wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have inadvertently been on to something. In a new paper in Nature, scientists have recorded a “black hole star” that is the size of our solar system and glows bright red in the depths of space. The findings are based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, which continues to change the way astronomers think about the cosmos. The researchers focused on some of the most distant observable phenomena in the universe, which appear to be something like a star in disguise. Based on the light they emit, they appear to share some characteristics with giant stars, but astronomers suspect that they are actually black holes enveloped in extraordinarily dense and luminous gas. These hypothetical objects have been called black hole stars, and the new research, published Wednesday, justifies them. The signal at the center of the study comes from a time when the universe was only 660 million years old. (It is now almost 14 billion years old.) In JWST images, the object appears as one of many bright, reddish dots the telescope has found in the early universe. Examples of the famous and puzzling red dots of the early universe. Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College) From a distance of billions of light years, this phenomenon appears to be a gigantic star. But the object, known as MoM-BH*-1, has some curious properties. According to the team, it emits about 100 billion times more energy than any star could produce through nuclear fusion. Even for the time it formed, during the early universe, it is an extremely bright object. Furthermore, some of its light abruptly disappears. Stars can produce a similar signal when their atmospheres absorb certain wavelengths, but in MoM-BH*-1, the effect is too strong to explain as normal star behavior. Researchers believe that a huge amount of extremely dense gas is absorbing that light. These clues led scientists to the black hole star hypothesis. At the center of MoM-BH*-1, there would be a black hole devouring matter and releasing enormous amounts of energy. Around it, a huge envelope of gas. The energy would pass through that gas before escaping into space and, in the process, take on some of the characteristics we would normally expect to find in starlight. The hypothesis could help address another mystery uncovered by the JWST. The telescope finds, with surprising frequency, small red spots in the early universe whose origins remain uncertain. They don’t fit neatly into the usual categories of deep space objects. Scientists have proposed several explanations, including that they are compact galaxies full of stars, black holes hidden by dust, and systems completely different from those we observe in the current universe.
