Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star

Amazing stuff!

"Astronomers ... have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.

The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.” ..."

From the abstract:

"The physical processes that led to the formation of billion-solar-mass black holes within the first 700 million years of cosmic time, a period known as cosmic dawn, remain a puzzle.

Several theoretical scenarios have been proposed to seed and rapidly grow black holes, but direct observations of these mechanisms remain elusive.

Here we present a source 660 million years after the Big Bang that exhibits singular properties: among the largest hydrogen Balmer breaks reported at any redshift, broad multi-peaked Hβ emission, and Balmer line absorption in several transitions.

We model this source as an enshrouded black hole in which the Balmer break and absorption features are a result of extremely dense, turbulent gas forming a dust-free envelope around a supermassive black hole.

This source may provide evidence of an early black hole embedded in dense gas—a theoretical configuration proposed to rapidly grow black holes by super-Eddington accretion.

Radiation from the black hole seems to dominate almost all observed light, leaving limited room for contribution from its host galaxy. If the source merged with its brighter neighbour, it would resemble the recently discovered ‘little red dots’ with perplexing spectral energy distributions.

The redness of the black hole is due to gas, not dust, and scattering, not kinematics, gives rise to the complex line shapes and luminosities—black hole masses of these sources may therefore be overestimated by orders of magnitude."

Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "The mashup of a black hole and an enormous star has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep-space images."

A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn (open access)

Fig. 1: JWST imaging and spectroscopy of MoM-BH*-1.