:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Rohan Naidu]
You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter. That means you cannot be powering this by nuclear fusion, the energy source at the heart of every star we have ever known.
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:INFO
MoM-BH-1: Born 660 Million Years After the Big Bang
On August 12, 2026, a U.S.-led team published findings in Nature that stopped astrophysicists cold. The James Webb Space Telescope had spotted a tiny red dot in the infant universe, designated MoM-BH-1 after the team's "Mirage or Miracle" survey. It looks like an enormous star. But it shines with the energy of 100 billion suns, a brightness no star is physically capable of producing. The best model: a black hole about 100,000 times the mass of our Sun, wrapped inside a dense cocoon of hydrogen roughly the size of our entire solar system. The cocoon makes it look stellar. The black hole is the engine.
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:STATS
[icon:STAR] Object name | MoM-BH-1 (Mirage or Miracle Survey)
[icon:CLOCK] Age | 660 million years after the Big Bang
[icon:TRENDING_UP] Brightness | 100 billion times brighter than any known star
[icon:TARGET] Black hole mass | approx. 100,000 solar masses
[icon:FIRE] Hydrogen cocoon size | roughly the diameter of our solar system
[icon:CHART] Candidate black hole stars found | 241 across JWST observations
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:NOTE.half
What It Looks Like
From JWST's camera, MoM-BH-1 reads as a compact, extremely bright red dot. Its spectrum shows a sharp Balmer break, a signature of hydrogen absorbing light, the same fingerprint seen in stellar atmospheres. Everything about its appearance says: star.
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:NOTE.half
What It Cannot Be
No star produces 100 billion times its own solar luminosity. Nuclear fusion simply cannot generate energy at that scale. The red dot also contains almost no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, ruling out the evolved chemistry of normal stars. Something else is at work here.
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:THREAD
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:INFO
The Little Red Dots Problem
Since JWST began its deep-field surveys, it has repeatedly spotted mysterious compact red sources scattered across the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Astronomers called them "little red dots" and could not agree on what they were. Were they heavily dust-obscured galaxies? Odd active galactic nuclei? The MoM-BH-1 team ran simulations showing that when MoM-BH-1 and a nearby brighter galaxy eventually merge (in roughly 100 million years from that point in cosmic time), their combined spectrum would look almost exactly like those baffling little red dots. One discovery may explain dozens of unsolved cases at once.
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:CHECKLIST
[ ] Study published in Nature, August 12, 2026, led by Rohan Naidu at MIT
[ ] 241 candidate black hole star objects identified across JWST survey data
[ ] MoM-BH-1 located close to a brighter galaxy, merger predicted in 100 million years
[ ] If confirmed, rewrites how supermassive black holes formed in the early universe
[ ] Follow-up observations planned to rule out alternative models
[ ] Future JWST deep surveys may reveal hundreds more black hole star candidates
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:LINK
https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812
MIT News: Astronomers discover a new type of astrophysical object