Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an object from 660 million years after the big bang that they describe as a 'black hole star' — a large black hole surrounded by pristine gas rather than stars or dust, which produces 100 billion times the energy of any known star and spans roughly the size of the solar system. The finding, published in Nature, was led by Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
Astronomers describe 'black hole star' detected by James Webb Space Telescope
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an object from 660 million years after the big bang that they describe as a 'black hole star' — a large black hole surrounded by pristine gas rather than stars or dust, which produces 100 billion times the energy of any known star and spans roughly the size of the solar system. The finding, published in Nature, was led by Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
The object, designated MoM-BH*-1, is one of a class of unexplained specks in early-universe JWST imagery that researchers have called 'little red dots,' or LRDs. These objects originate from between roughly 650 million and 1.6 billion years after the big bang, and light from MoM-BH*-1 has travelled more than 13 billion years to reach Earth.
Analysis of the dot's light showed it was not coming from stars or interstellar dust but instead from very dense hydrogen and helium gas. Naidu said it took several months of simulations to arrive at a model that matched the data.
The resulting model describes a large, young black hole enveloped by a cloud of gas. The black hole itself is estimated to be about eight times the size of the Sun, while the surrounding gas cloud extends to roughly the size of the solar system. The object has approximately one million times the mass of Earth's Sun, according to Nicholas Seymour, an astronomer at Curtin University who was not involved in the research.
The researchers named the object a 'black hole star' because it resembles a massive star in appearance but is powered by a black hole at its centre. Bluer light from the black hole is absorbed by the surrounding gas, which the researchers suggest accounts for the red dot appearance in JWST imagery.
Naidu and other researchers subsequently examined 100 additional little red dots and found that a gas-enshrouded centre similar to MoM-BH*-1 appears to be present in each of them.
The discovery contributes to a reassessment of how supermassive black holes formed in the early universe. The conventional view held that black holes were first seeded by the collapse of massive, short-lived stars. The new observations suggest that supermassive black holes can form without surrounding galaxies, and that black holes may have come first and later served as seeds for galaxy formation around them.
Seymour said he has been using the Murchison Widefield Array and the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescopes in Western Australia to search for early-universe black holes, and suggested these instruments may be able to detect more such objects and potentially observe black holes at even earlier stages of growth.
- The total number of little red dots detected by JWST across all observations is not stated.
- The specific mechanism by which the black hole acquired its mass without a surrounding galaxy is not detailed.
- The paper's full list of authors and institutional affiliations beyond Naidu's are not provided.
- Whether MoM-BH*-1 has been observed by any telescope other than JWST is not stated.
- The peer-review process or any independent verification of the model beyond the simulations described is not addressed.
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