Astronomers have described an object that fits none of their existing categories. They call it a black hole star, and it may settle one of the longest arguments of the James Webb era.

The object is catalogued as MoM-BH*-1. A team led by Rohan Naidu of the University of Hawaii published the analysis in the journal Nature on 12 August 2026. Its light left when the universe was 660 million years old. The Big Bang happened roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

Since Webb began observing in 2022, it has picked out small, intensely red points of light in the young universe. Astronomers called them little red dots and could not say what they were. By 2025 the telescope had counted 341 of them, Smithsonian magazine reports. "What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era," Naidu said in a statement.

Red normally means dust. Study co-author Robert Simcoe of MIT compared the effect to Canadian wildfire smoke turning the sky over Boston red. The data pointed somewhere else. At certain wavelengths the object's light disappeared entirely, a signature known as a Balmer break. It was stronger than any measured in a star, and it indicated dense hydrogen gas rather than dust.

What the simulations showed

That explained the colour but not the power output. The object shines about 100 billion times brighter than any star, CBS News reports, and nuclear fusion cannot deliver that. "You can't be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars," Naidu said.

Computer models pointed to a single answer. A black hole of roughly 100,000 solar masses sits at the centre. Around it lies a cocoon of hot hydrogen about as wide as the solar system. The cocoon glows like a stellar atmosphere while the black hole supplies the energy.

Two researchers outside the team back that reading. Dominik Schleicher of Sapienza University of Rome and Rodrigo Herrera-Camus of the University of Concepción wrote a commentary published alongside the paper. The red colour comes from gas, they wrote, with a negligible contribution from dust.

The name carries a claim. The asterisk marks the black hole star, and the number one implies successors. "Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star," Naidu said. MoM-BH*-1 is unusual because it outshines its own host galaxy completely, which leaves astronomers looking at what he calls pure black hole star light.

That claim now has to hold up against the hundreds of fainter red dots already sitting in Webb's archive.