MoM-BH*-1, the first black hole star ever found

MoM-BH*-1 is a distant object spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope and identified as the first ever "black hole star", a hybrid in which a supermassive black hole sits wrapped inside a vast, dense cloud of gas. It was found during the MoM survey, a JWST programme hunting for the oldest and most distant galaxies. The study appears in the journal Nature. Sources: Nature, MIT.

A black hole star, also called a quasi-star, is a theoretical object in which a black hole grows at the heart of an enormous envelope of gas, which glows like a single gigantic star while the black hole feeds on it from the inside. Astronomers had predicted such objects for years, but until now none had ever been observed. MoM-BH*-1 is the first candidate to be formally placed in that category. Sources: Nature, Sci.News.

It turned up in data from the James Webb Space Telescope, collected as part of the MoM survey, which was looking for the earliest galaxies in the universe. The object had already been catalogued as one of JWST's puzzling "little red dots", but a closer analysis of its light revealed the signature of a black hole cocooned in gas rather than an ordinary galaxy. Sources: Nature, Interesting Engineering.

It lies in the direction of the constellation Cetus, the Whale, a large southern-sky constellation. Because it belongs to the very early universe, it is far too faint and far too distant to be seen with amateur equipment: only a space telescope like JWST can pick it out. Sources: Sci.News, Space Daily.

The light JWST collected left the object when the universe was roughly 660 million years old, so we are seeing it as it existed less than 5 percent of the way into cosmic history. Everything astronomers describe about it is a snapshot of that ancient era, not of what may be there today. Sources: Nature, Sci.News.

The black hole at its centre weighs about 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, and the glowing gas structure around it is roughly as large as our entire Solar System. The whole object shines around 100 billion times brighter than a typical star, bright enough to outshine the galaxy that hosts it. Sources: Nature, MIT.

"Little red dots" is the nickname astronomers gave to a population of small, compact, very red sources that JWST kept finding in the early universe. Their nature has been debated since the telescope's first deep images. MoM-BH*-1 was one of them, and identifying it as a black hole star gives the strongest clue yet as to what many of these dots really are. Sources: Nature, Interesting Engineering.

One of the biggest open questions in astrophysics is how supermassive black holes got so massive so quickly after the Big Bang. A black hole growing inside a huge reservoir of gas offers a fast track: it can feed continuously instead of waiting for material to fall in. MoM-BH*-1 turns that idea from theory into an observed object. Sources: Nature, MIT.

The work comes from the team behind JWST's MoM survey and is published in Nature. Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist at MIT and one of the study's authors, described the object as "one in a billion", underlining how rare such a find is. Sources: Nature, MIT.

No. The object sits billions of light-years away in the early universe and has no physical effect on Earth whatsoever. Its interest is purely scientific: it tells astronomers how black holes and galaxies grew when the cosmos was young. Sources: Nature, Sci.News.