Astronomers Find a New Kind of Cosmic Object: A Black Hole Wrapped in Gas That Glows Like a Star

According to the team’s model, MoM-BH-1 may be a black hole star: a supermassive black hole so completely wrapped in hydrogen gas that, from a distance, it looks like a single impossibly bright star. The object, catalogued MoM-BH-1, was spotted in James Webb Space Telescope images from roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang — among the earliest objects proposed as “black hole stars” so far. The peer-reviewed Nature paper, titled “A Gas Enshrouded and Gas Reddened Black Hole at Cosmic Dawn,” was led by astronomer Rohan Naidu and published on August 12, 2026.

Key facts

Object: MoM-BH*-1, a candidate black hole star modeled as a supermassive black hole wrapped in a dense envelope of hydrogen gas that mimics a star
Spotted: in James Webb Space Telescope images from roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang
Lead researcher: astronomer Rohan Naidu, now an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Institute for Astronomy (he did the work as a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT)
Published: in the journal Nature on August 12, 2026, after a preprint posted in March 2025
Estimated black hole mass: The team’s model puts the central black hole at roughly 100,000 times the mass of the sun, but the Nature paper warns that such masses may be overestimated by orders of magnitude
Energy output: about 100 billion times more than any known star can produce

Timeline

March 20, 2025: The team posts a preprint describing MoM-BH*-1 and a second candidate, “The Cliff”
Early August 2026: A separate team proposes a competing explanation for “little red dots”
August 12, 2026: The peer-reviewed paper on MoM-BH*-1 is published in Nature

Who found it

Naidu did the underlying work as a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. He has since moved on: he is now an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Institute for Astronomy. Two of his co-authors are still at MIT — Robert Simcoe, who directs the MIT Kavli Institute, and Wendy Sun, a member of MIT’s class of 2026 — along with collaborators at other institutions that MIT’s own announcement does not name individually.

How the object was spotted

The object first turned up as an unusually bright, deep-red point of light in Webb imaging, found through a survey the team nicknamed “Mirage or Miracle” — built specifically to sort real, ultra-distant discoveries from imaging artifacts. That survey name is also where the object’s catalog number comes from: “MoM” for Mirage or Miracle, “BH*” for black hole star, and “1” because it’s the first one the team identified. Researchers first posted their findings as a preprint in March 2025, before the peer-reviewed Nature paper appeared roughly 17 months later.

Why it puts out so much energy

What makes the object strange is how much energy it puts out: about 100 billion times more than any known star can physically produce. The researchers say that output rules out ordinary nuclear fusion, the process that powers every star. “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. Instead, the team’s model describes a rapidly growing black hole — which Naidu put at roughly 100,000 times the mass of the sun — wrapped in an extremely dense, turbulent envelope of hydrogen gas roughly the size of the solar system. “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun,” Naidu said. “And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system.”

Why it glows red

That gas envelope also explains the object’s color, according to Simcoe. “When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust,” he said. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen.” The Nature paper itself is careful to frame this as the team’s leading model rather than a proven fact, and it flags a real source of uncertainty: the complex light patterns Webb measured, it says, come from the gas scattering light, not from the object’s own motion — which is what mass estimates for objects like this usually rely on — so “black hole masses of these sources may therefore be overestimated by orders of magnitude.” The paper also reports a hydrogen Balmer break among the largest seen at any redshift: a roughly 7.7-fold drop in light across the break, compared with about 2.6-fold for Vega.

A clue to other cosmic mysteries

Researchers think objects like this one could help explain a separate puzzle: a population of small, unusually red objects called “little red dots” that Webb has found scattered throughout the early universe. Naidu says every little red dot examined so far is “consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” and that these objects “seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day.” Co-author Jorryt Matthee, of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, said black hole stars like MoM-BH*-1 “might well serve as the central engines of baby quasars,” and that using its spectrum as a template “helps clarify many of the uncertainties” about the little red dots Webb keeps finding.

A competing theory

But the Nature paper’s own language stays conditional rather than declaring the mystery solved, and the idea has competition: about a week before this study appeared, a separate team at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian proposed a different explanation for the same little red dots, describing them instead as a kind of pulsating supermassive star. Which explanation holds up, if either does, is still an open question in the field. Smithsonian Magazine’s coverage frames the black-hole-star idea itself as a hypothesis still to be tested against larger samples and higher-resolution spectroscopy, not a settled conclusion.

Not a solitary find

MoM-BH-1 also isn’t a solitary find. The same March 20, 2025 preprint that introduced it also described a second candidate, nicknamed “The Cliff” — located at what researchers call “cosmic noon,” roughly 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, far later in the universe’s history than MoM-BH-1’s 660-million-year mark. Researchers say having more than one example strengthens the case that black hole stars are a genuine new class of object rather than a one-off fluke. The paper presents the surrounding-gas configuration as a theoretical way black holes could grow rapidly, not as a confirmed mechanism.

Searching for more candidates

The team says it plans to use MoM-BH-1’s detailed spectrum as a template for hunting down more candidates among the many little red dots Webb has already catalogued. Separately, another group of astronomers has already published its own black hole star candidate, called PAN-BH-1, at a redshift of about 1.7 — a measurement that places it at a later point in cosmic history than The Cliff and much closer to the present day than MoM-BH*-1’s 660-million-year mark. Its team likewise nicknames that era “cosmic noon.” That’s a sign the search for these objects is already under way elsewhere, even as scientists work out what, exactly, they are looking at.