Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole 'Star' (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0184978576
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/08/14/2224234/astronomers-discover-a-new-kind-of-cosmic-object-a-black-hole-star
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/12/astronomy-discovery-new-cosmic-object-black-hole-star
> The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early universe captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light years from Earth. It is thought to have formed 660m years after the big bang, astronomers' leading theory as to how the universe began. Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars.
The findings have been [2]published in the journal Nature .
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/12/astronomy-discovery-new-cosmic-object-black-hole-star
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10846-4
Missing mass (Score:3)
What’s left off these articles is the scope. The central black hole in these red dots are super massive at approximately 100k the mass of the sun. The most plausible mechanism suggested so far is direct collapse from significant density differences in the early universe where too much stuff wound up being in too small a place and it directly formed a black hole without forming a conventional star.
A solar mass scale black hole would be unable to grow that quickly, even if surrounded by gas. It differs from a quasar, some of the brightest objects in the visible universe created by a feeding black hole and studied for decades, mostly from the surrounding gas being spherical and acting as a radiator of the internal heat as opposed to an accretion disk and relatively open space otherwise.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps the answer is that the "Big Bang" wasn't the first, and these black holes are left over from a prior "universe". In that case, though, why are they so close together.
They are getting older (Score:2)
It seems that 'the earliest Black Holes' (as observed by our increasingky accurate telescopes) are getting older and older, but are they really?
For extremely distant objects we rely on the Red Shift to calculate the distance (and therefore age)
But large black holes also have extreme gravity to incease the red shift of radia.ted electromagnetic waves.
In fact by definition the red shift of something at the event horizon is infinite.
Maybe we should take those 'age' indications with a grain of salt, especially
Re: (Score:2)
> But large black holes also have extreme gravity
But do they really? They have greater mass. But the Schwarzschild radius is (sort of) defined by that distance from an object's center where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. And that is what we think about when we say "gravity". So this value should be the same at the "surface" of every black hole.
If this is the case, then the effects occuring near this surface would be the same for all black holes, given an identical height above it. And given that, we would have trouble picking apart a
Not sure this is a new discovery (Score:2, Informative)
Soundgarden wrote a song about this all the way back in '94.
Re: Not sure this is a new discovery (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)ve been hypothesised for a long time. Actually finding that little red dots actually are them, ⦠no, thatâ(TM)s not been a thing since 1994.
Re: (Score:2)
The only decent song they wrote.
Re: (Score:1)
Dang it, you beat me to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Black hole star
You're so far
And very very bright
What a light
What a light
What a light
I think that's how it went anyway