Astronomers just found something that doesn’t fit any category we have: a “black hole star.”
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an MIT-led team spotted a very bright red dot from the early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. At first glance it looks like a gigantic star, about the size of our entire solar system. But it’s putting out 100 billion times more energy than any star can produce, which is much closer to what a black hole does.
The best explanation is a mashup of both. At the center sits a black hole about 100,000 times the mass of our sun, wrapped in a thick cocoon of hydrogen gas. The black hole acts as the power source, while the gas glows like the surface of a star.
This could solve a bigger mystery too. Webb keeps finding these “little red dots” all over the early universe, and nobody has been sure what they are. Researchers now suspect many of them could be black hole stars as well.
The team wasn’t even looking for this. They were hunting for the earliest galaxies when one strange dot stood out. As lead author Rohan Naidu put it, what looks like a bright young galaxy can sometimes turn out to be a mirage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpuV33vpNk
#Space #Astronomy #JWST #BlackHole #Science
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an MIT-led team spotted a very bright red dot from the early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. At first glance it looks like a gigantic star, about the size of our entire solar system. But it’s putting out 100 billion times more energy than any star can produce, which is much closer to what a black hole does.
The best explanation is a mashup of both. At the center sits a black hole about 100,000 times the mass of our sun, wrapped in a thick cocoon of hydrogen gas. The black hole acts as the power source, while the gas glows like the surface of a star.
This could solve a bigger mystery too. Webb keeps finding these “little red dots” all over the early universe, and nobody has been sure what they are. Researchers now suspect many of them could be black hole stars as well.
The team wasn’t even looking for this. They were hunting for the earliest galaxies when one strange dot stood out. As lead author Rohan Naidu put it, what looks like a bright young galaxy can sometimes turn out to be a mirage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpuV33vpNk
#Space #Astronomy #JWST #BlackHole #Science
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