A New Kind of Object Keeps Showing Up In Webb's Latest Images — And It's Not a Glitch
In half of Webb's filters there's nothing at this spot. In the reddest one it's the reddest object in the field, shining like a few hundred billion suns. The team that found it called it a black hole star. By the time Nature printed the paper, fifteen months later, that name was gone from the title, the abstract and every line but one.
This video follows MoM-BH*-1 from the accidental 2023 spectrum to the Nature version: the Balmer break of 7.7 that no population of stars can make, the notch in the hydrogen lines that needs a billion atoms per cubic centimetre, the model with a black hole inside a 40 AU hydrogen cocoon, and the two feeding rates and three black hole masses (200 million, 50 million, one million suns) that sit in the same paper. Then the split: the Quanta piece of 14 September, Roberto Maiolino's ordinary-black-hole reading, the direct 50-million-sun mass in Abell 2744 QSO1, the "holes in the black hole star" preprint, Nandal and Loeb's supermassive-star alternative, and the four claims you sign the moment you say the name.
Status notes: the Ji et al. "holes" paper and the Gentile et al. quasi-star paper are preprints and have not been peer reviewed. Weibel et al. (241 candidates) was posted this year; check its status before citing.
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SOURCES
Naidu, Matthee et al., "A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn," Nature 656, 329–333 (12 Aug 2026): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10846-4
Preprint version (20 Mar 2025), "A 'Black Hole Star' Reveals the Remarkable Gas-Enshrouded Hearts of the Little Red Dots": https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16596
The MoM-BH*-1 prism spectra on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15059214
MIT News, 12 Aug 2026: https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812
ISTA / http://phys.org , "Mirage or miracle?": https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mirage-miracle-jwst-earliest-black.html
Quanta Magazine, 14 Sep 2026, "Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope's 'Little Red Dots'": https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-holes-or-black-hole-stars-astronomers-spar-over-webb-telescopes-little-red-dots-20260914/
Juodžbalis et al., "A direct black-hole mass measurement in a little red dot at high redshift," Nature (27 May 2026): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10579-4
Ji et al., "Holes in the BH*?" (preprint, 3 Apr 2026): https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03370
Nandal & Loeb, "Supermassive Stars Match the Spectral Signatures of JWST's Little Red Dots," ApJ 998 (5 Feb 2026): https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae32f3
Begelman & Dexter, "Little Red Dots As Late-stage Quasi-stars," ApJ (2026): https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09085
Gentile, Giavalisco et al., "The quasi-star model for Little Red Dots: potential and challenges" (preprint, rev. 11 Sep 2026): https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06575
Torralba et al., "A Black Hole Star at Cosmic Noon," ApJL (2026): https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae7bfd
Scientific American on the X-ray little red dot (Hviding et al.): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/x-ray-dot-discovery-fuels-jwst-black-hole-star-debate/
#JWST #BlackHoleStar #Space