Scientists discover a never-before-seen ‘black hole star’
The new object discovered by astronomers may explain the mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA says that a stellar-mass black hole tore a star apart which created an unusually long-lasting gamma ray burst that has been identified as “GRB 250702B.” AccuWeather’s Emilee Speck has the story.
Astronomers have recently discovered a new type of cosmic object: a black hole star.
The object, unintentionally found by astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), appeared to be “an extremely bright red spot in the early universe,” according to MIT News. The star expelled 100 billion times more energy than any known star – similar to energies generated by a black hole -- and spanned the size of our solar system, leading scientists to place the object into its own category.
Astronomers have discovered a “black hole star,” an extremely bright red spot in the early universe that appears to be a new type of astrophysical object. (Image credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT)
The star is also likely a dense cloud of gas powered by a central black hole, rather than standard nuclear fusion.
“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said in the release. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”
The astronomers found the “black hole star,” known as MoM-BH*-1, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, note that the object is likely a combination of a star and a black hole, a phenomenon that has never been observed until now.
MIT also investigated the star’s red color. Simulations suggest the red dot is a powerful energy source surrounded by a dense hydrogen cocoon.
Astronomers use the mass of our solar system’s sun as a measurement for huge things in the universe, including black holes. For example, our Milky Way has a black hole called Sagittarius A*, which is 4 million times the sun’s mass. Simulations suggest the red dot is a black hole about 100,000 times as massive as the sun encased in a starlike cocoon, leading researchers to call it a “black hole star.”
Stars (left) can be thought of as a dense ball of gas powered by nuclear fusion at their centers. Black holes (center) typically grow by consuming matter via a pancake-like accretion disk. Black hole stars (right) represent a new kind of object — nascent black holes enshrouded in dense gas such that they effectively radiate in a star-like manner. (Image credit: iStock; Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT)
The discovery may pave the way for the identification of other “little red dots,” which are seen in almost every existing JWST deep-space image.
“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu said. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”
Naidu added that while every red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, MoM-BH*-1 is the brightest of these objects, allowing astronomers to observe nearly pure black hole star light.
Report a Typo
