James Webb Telescope Discovers a Cosmic Object That Is Part Black Hole, Part Star

A New Class of Object Hidden in Plain Sight

Since history's most powerful telescope went online in 2022, it has been spotting many extremely bright cosmic objects dubbed "little red dots" in the early universe that have baffled scientists. For years, no one could explain what they were. Now, a team of astronomers may have cracked one of the biggest mysteries of the James Webb Space Telescope era — and the answer is something nobody anticipated: an entirely new kind of cosmic object.

The study, published August 12, 2026 in Nature by a team led by Rohan Naidu of the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy, describes MoM-BH*-1 as a "black hole star": a supermassive black hole in the universe's first 660 million years, so thoroughly enveloped in dense, turbulent gas that it radiates like a star while growing at rates that standard accretion physics cannot easily explain.

What Exactly Is a "Black Hole Star"?

The object — designated MoM-BH*-1 — consists of a central black hole roughly 100,000 times as massive as the sun, enveloped by a star-like gas cloud comparable in physical size to the entire solar system. It looks like a star. It glows like a star. But nothing about it behaves like one. The object is comparable in size to a giant star roughly the scale of our solar system, yet its energy output was measured at 100 billion times more than any known star could physically produce — approaching the energy scale achievable only by a supermassive black hole.

Labeled MoM-BH*-1, the source was essentially invisible in Webb's bluer filters but blazed in the redder ones, giving it one of the most extreme colors ever recorded in a distant object. Follow-up spectroscopy revealed why: the object shows the strongest "Balmer break" ever measured at any redshift, a sharp drop in brightness at a wavelength normally associated with dense gas in the outer layers of stars. Ordinary starlight simply can't produce a break this severe; even the reddest known stellar populations top out at less than a third of the strength seen here. In short, the data ruled out every known explanation — except a black hole wrapped in a thick cocoon of gas.

Solving the "Little Red Dots" Mystery

When little red dots were first discovered, astronomers genuinely thought that something broke in the James Webb Space Telescope, which observed these ancient objects. "What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era," lead study author Rohan Naidu said in a statement. The black hole star model now offers the most compelling answer yet. Such little red dots are extremely common, with one found on average in every such image. Every little red dot may be powered by a black hole star.

MoM-BH*-1 is the best example yet of a "naked" black hole star, meaning astronomers are fairly certain it exists in space on its own rather than inside a burgeoning galaxy. This means all of its light is generated by accretion onto the black hole at the center of the cloud. Though we cannot see this accretion because of the obscuring gas cloud, this light energizes the surrounding cloud from within, causing it to glow. As Naidu put it, "the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we're seeing pure black hole star light."

A Missing Link in Cosmic History

JWST observations have revealed that supermassive black holes with billions of solar masses already existed in the early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang — far too little time for conventional growth. Black hole stars could be the missing piece of that puzzle. Naidu explained that black hole stars may be the "birth story of possibly every supermassive black hole," whereas little red dots could be seen as a black hole star "embedded within a larger galaxy."

Naidu suspects that black hole stars may arise from mergers of bizarre-but-plausible "supermassive stars" in the early universe, each weighing tens of thousands of suns, which themselves formed from smaller stars mashing together in quick succession in stellar swarms called globular clusters. "We think this happens within globular clusters whose properties have puzzled us for decades," Naidu says. Together, these observations position black hole stars as the most robust explanation for little red dots, offering a path toward solving the fifty-year-old puzzle of the origin and evolution of supermassive black holes. The universe, it turns out, may have built its largest structures through a process stranger — and more spectacular — than anyone had imagined.