The James Webb space telescope finds the strongest evidence yet of ‘black hole stars’

The complex puzzle of the objects known as little red dots (LRDs) has gradually become more complete since their initial discovery by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot”s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.

doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae4ed7
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NASA, ESA, and CSA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to unravel mysteries of the early Universe

Since 2022, it has detected an intriguing class of objects called “little red dots” (LRDs), which appeared about 600 million years after the Big Bang.

Now, a detailed analysis of one of these dots has yielded the most compelling evidence to date that they may be supermassive black holes enveloped in a dense cocoon of gas.

A team led by Vasily Kokorev of the University of Texas at Austin studied the object GLIMPSE-17775. Thanks to a rare combination of luck and technology, astronomers obtained the deepest spectrum ever recorded of a small red dot.

This spectrum, equivalent to more than 80 hours of observation due to the gravitational lensing effect of a background galaxy cluster, revealed more than 40 spectral lines.

They all point to a rapidly growing black hole, surrounded by a thick cloud of ionized gas that reprocesses the light emitted near it.

“When we first saw the spectrum, it was like having all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on the floor,” explained Kokorev.

“We put each piece together and realized that they fit perfectly into the ‘star-black hole’ model.”

Among the evidence are lines of hydrogen, oxygen, helium, and especially an “iron forest” with 16 lines of this element.

The width and intensity of these lines indicate the presence of a very dense medium around a high-energy source-exactly what is expected of a black hole in the process of accretion (swallowing matter).

The model also explains why these objects are weak in X-rays: the emission is absorbed by the cocoon of gas.

The James Webb data were complemented by observations from the Hubble Telescope, which helped to understand why the “Balmer bounce” (a typical feature of these points) appears weaker: the object is surrounded by a giant host galaxy.

This resolves another question: some of the extra blue light comes from the stars of this galaxy, and the black hole doesn’t need to be as massive as previously thought.

With this, the Universe doesn’t need to be “rewritten.” Everything fits into the evolutionary history we already know.

“Nothing is broken, and that makes the puzzle of our Universe even more beautiful,” said Kokorev.

Scientists believe we are close to a unified picture for these small red dots.

In the coming years, deeper observations should definitively confirm what fuels these mysterious objects from the early cosmos.

The James Webb Telescope, once again, proves to be the most powerful tool for exploring the first chapters of the Universe’s history.

Published in 06/10/2026 21h13

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Text adapted by AI (Grok) and translated via Google API in the English version. Images from public image libraries or credits in the caption. Information about DOI, author and institution can be found in the body of the article.

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