Astronomers reported a new kind of cosmic object in Nature on 12 August 2026: a “black hole star” roughly the scale of a solar system, whose star-like envelope is powered not by nuclear fusion but by a feeding black hole. The discovery may finally explain the hundreds of mysterious Little Red Dots JWST has been finding throughout the early universe.

Astronomers reported a new kind of cosmic object in Nature on 12 August 2026: a “black hole star” roughly the scale of a solar system, whose star-like envelope is powered not by nuclear fusion but by a feeding black hole. The discovery may finally explain the hundreds of mysterious Little Red Dots JWST has been finding throughout the early universe.

On 12 August 2026, astronomers reported something in Nature that sounds almost too theatrical to be useful science: a “black hole star.” It is not a conventional star, and nobody has watched a black hole replace a stellar core. It is a young massive black hole apparently wrapped in such a dense, extended envelope of hydrogen that the whole system develops some of the spectral features of a gigantic star. The object is called MoM-BH*-1. We see it…