It looks like a star. It glows like a star. Its light even carries the signature of a hydrogen and helium atmosphere, just like a star. But it is roughly 100,000 times larger than our Sun, it blazes about 100 billion times brighter — and where a star would keep its nuclear furnace, this object keeps a black hole.
Astronomers are calling it a black hole star: a feeding black hole around 100,000 solar masses, cocooned inside a vast envelope of dense, pristine hydrogen and helium from the early universe. The gas absorbs the black hole’s harsh light and re-emits it, glowing like an enormous stellar atmosphere. A star on the outside. An abyss on the inside.
This video covers the full four-year backstory: the “little red dots” Webb started finding in 2022 and nobody could explain, why both leading explanations failed, the object called The Cliff that gave astronomers their first real crack in the mystery, and MoM-BH*-1 — the earliest black hole star yet identified, found by Rohan Naidu’s team in the Mirage or Miracle survey.
And why it may finally answer the question we covered in our UHZ1 video: how the universe built its first supermassive black holes so impossibly fast.
💬 A star with a black hole heart, or a black hole wearing a star? Tell me in the comments.
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⏱️ Timestamps below 👇
0:00 An Object That Fits No Category
1:10 2022: Webb Finds the Little Red Dots
2:10 Why the Dots Broke Every Explanation
3:00 “Universe Breakers” — Too Bright, Too Small
3:45 The Missing X-Ray Glow
4:25 The Cliff: The First Real Crack
5:25 A Black Hole Wrapped in a Gas Cocoon
6:20 Mirage or Miracle: Finding MoM-BH*-1
7:25 The Scale: Larger Than Our Solar System
8:15 Why Accretion Beats Nuclear Fusion
8:50 The Missing Childhood Photo of Supermassive Black Holes
9:50 A Collision Course — and a Template
10:50 What’s Still Unconfirmed
11:45 A Third Kind of Thing
#JamesWebb #BlackHole #JWST #Astrophysics #SpaceDocumentary
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