Discovery of a New Type of Cosmic Object: Black Hole Stars
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an unusual object in the early universe that resembles neither a normal star nor a classic black hole. They are calling it a black hole star.
The object, designated MoM-BH*-1, appears as an enormous star roughly the size of the Solar System. It glows a brilliant red and radiates about 100 billion times more energy than any known star can produce through nuclear fusion. Such extreme luminosity is far closer to the output typically associated with black holes.
Spectral analysis reveals a central black hole with a mass of around 100,000 Suns, enveloped in a dense cocoon of hot hydrogen. This surrounding gas reprocesses the radiation from the black hole, giving the object its star-like appearance, distinctive red color, and a pronounced spectral feature known as a deep Balmer break. The light contains almost no metals—only hydrogen and helium.
The object is observed as it existed just 660 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still very young. Similar bright red points appear frequently in deep Webb images from that era and had remained mysterious until now. Many of them may turn out to be black hole stars—young black holes tightly wrapped in gaseous envelopes.
As the black hole gradually consumes the surrounding gas, the envelope disperses and the object fades. This naturally explains why such red dots are rarely seen in the present-day universe.
The discovery offers new insight into how supermassive black holes could have grown so rapidly in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. These hybrid objects may represent an important intermediate stage on the path to the giant black holes that now sit at the centers of most large galaxies.
Black hole stars highlight just how diverse and unexpected the physics of the early universe can be. Future observations will help determine how common these objects were and what role they played in shaping the cosmic structures we see today.
This is what Chicago looks like from a Thunderbirds F-16 cockpit. 🇺🇸✈️
Downtown skyscrapers, Lake Michigan, and then suddenly—the entire skyline is sideways.
This cockpit POV captures the precision behind a Thunderbirds demonstration as the F-16 rolls hard over the city, with the pilot making constant control inputs while flying the routine.
The Thunderbirds return to the 2026 Chicago Air & Water Show, August 15–16.
If you're watching from the lakefront, where’s the best spot to see them? 👀
A supernova explosion!
Supernova SN 2023ixf was discovered in May 2023 in the spiral galaxy M101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy).
SN 2023ixf is a Type II supernova, meaning its progenitor was a massive star that, having exhausted its fuel supply, decided to go out with a bang!
🔭 Captured using a TAL-200K telescope and an ASI533MM PRO astro-camera.
Video by N. Vdovin.
Cosmic Spiderwebs Are Whispering Secrets About Dark Matter’s Quiet Demise
Dark matter is the ultimate cosmic ghost: it makes up about 85% of the universe’s mass, holds galaxies together, and shapes the large-scale structure of everything we see—yet it refuses to interact with light or ordinary matter in any detectable way. For decades, physicists have chased it through gravity alone. Now a team led by David Dunsky at New York University has proposed a brilliantly sneaky new way to catch it in the act of slowly dying.
Their idea? Dark matter particles might occasionally decay into gravitons—the hypothetical messengers of gravity itself. Gravitons are almost as elusive as dark matter. But theory says that when a graviton travels through a magnetic field, it has a tiny chance of transforming into an ordinary photon via the Gertsenshtein effect. Suddenly the invisible becomes visible.
The perfect stage for this conversion is not the dense heart of the Milky Way, where most dark-matter searches focus, but the vast, thread-like cosmic filaments that form the universe’s cosmic web. These enormous structures stretch across millions of light-years, linking galaxies like the strands of a gigantic spiderweb, and they carry weak but coherent magnetic fields that fill a huge fraction of the observable universe. If dark matter is decaying into gravitons anywhere along these filaments, the gravitons can convert into a faint, steady glow of gamma-ray photons.
Dunsky’s team calculated what that glow should look like and compared it to the all-sky gamma-ray background mapped by NASA’s Fermi-LAT telescope. No unexplained excess appeared. That nondetection immediately delivered the first limits on how fast dark matter can decay into gravitons—across a vast range of possible particle masses.
What makes the approach elegant is its simplicity. It doesn’t invent exotic new physics beyond the decay itself; the conversion step relies on established electromagnetic processes. And because the signal would originate mostly from distant intergalactic filaments rather than the crowded Galactic center, it opens an entirely new observational window.
Looking ahead, a proposed next-generation instrument—the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope—could tighten these constraints by a factor of ten. If dark matter really is slowly leaking away into gravitons, the universe’s own magnetic spiderweb may ultimately give away the secret.
In the end, the cosmos has been broadcasting a subtle message all along. We just needed to know where—and how—to listen.